This has a very poor average rating from IMDb but don't let that put you off this forgotten gem of 1970s British exploitation cinema . It's certainly one of the most deranged movies I've seen in a long time and it'll take me a long time to forget it . It's interesting the screenwriter is called Brian Comport but one can't help thinking it's a word play on " Brain Compost " and is in fact a pen name for either Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens and the film sets out its amusingly tasteless stall right from the very start The film opens in a small church hall where we see a congregation listening to a fire and hell preacher whilst he carries out a baptism and you won't confuse this sequence with The God Channel " Sing my brethren sing " And indeed a miracle does indeed take place . Despite there only being a solitary church organ in the hall, trumpets , percussion instruments and electric guitars are heard as the lead singer mouths words to an entirely different song while the congregation have epileptic fits and terminal attacks of Tourette's syndrome . Tne momentum is kept up as after the title sequence we're treated to a British version of BATMAN where a security guard gets in to a punch up with a couple of villains . Just a pity the director forgot to put in the ZAP ! POW ! OUCH ! captions onto the screen . Luckily the security guard is rescued by the rozzers who tell him he's lucky the villains were only carrying screwdrivers ! Let me get this straight - if you're mugged by a couple of bad guys armed with screwdrivers you should be thankful that they're not carrying dangerous weapons ? well that's put my mind at rest Some people might claim it's offensive the way this film portrays Christians but I disagree . It's religion itself that's the target of THE FIEND . To quote Professor Steven Weinberg " In a secular world good people would do good things and bad people would do bad things but in order for good people to do bad things only religion must be involved . THE FIEND being rabid exploitation cinema doesn't concern itself with such cerebral philosophy but still rightly portrays religion as the worst thing ever invented by the human species and if anyone feels offended by its portrayal of Christianity would the same person feel offended if the story was set in Pakistan or Afghanistan where a student of a Madrasa school goes around killing infidels ?That said 1971 was a different world when this film was produced and religion did in fact find a new window of bad opportunity with new age thinking . Christianity was simply an old , boring dying religion and people handing out pamphlets and preaching damnation if sinners didn't repent would still have found a politely indifferent audience . Imagine how this modified scene from the film would look today in the present moral zietgeist as Kenny knocks on the door of a teenage schoolgirl " Is your mother in " " No . Why ? " I'm from the BBC "

This movie is boring because the story proceeds so painfully slowly, the director presumably trying (though failing) to induce a slow crescendo of menace. It is frightening not because of the few brief glimpses of violent crime or its result, but because we know that all too many simple minded (or just plain stupid) people in the real world are capable of falling into the clutches of the sort of nasty, egotistical, sadistic bully, totally self-absorbed in his delusion of moral rectitude and continually playing the puritanical guilt card with his half-witted followrs, that is the Minister played so effectively here by Patrick Magee; and that there are all too many instances (though, thankfully, several orders of magnitude fewer than the numbers of the stupid and simple minded) of children growing up in the warped, hyper-pious but actually vicious atmosphere created in families and communities where such ministers of so-called religion and their equally nasty followers rule the roost, who grow up so mentally disturbed that they eventually do terrible things.However, here the point is made so slowly that it takes much patience to sit through it; I imagine that it made no major moral impact on society when it appeared and that it has has been all but forgotten in the 36 years since. Given how much has come to light during those 36 years of the evils I refer to, one could perhaps claim that the film was in some small way prescient like Cassandra; however there were enough signs before, just not the instant media coverage thereof that there would be in the 21st century. All too many people follow religions with all too much blind zeal nowadays as before, and probably as always since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately this movie will not be seen by enough people to influence that doom-laden trend. The sort of people about which this movie warns us are probably just the sort of people who believe that to watch movies at all is immoral!

Do you like horror? Yes? Good ... well, then I advise you to avoid this one and if you ever see it in the videostore, leave it peacefully on its shelf. Do you like splatter or gore? Avoid it, there's no single gory effect. Unless you consider amateuristic filmed murder scenes as splatter. Do you like horror with some laughs? Avoid it, because there's nothing to laugh about (no, more to cry about!) Do you like decent Amicus or Hammer productions, with charismatic actors like Cushing or Lee? Avoid it, because the story line is sooo boring, almost nothing happens and nobody can act. All the characters are very lame (annoying mother, annoying priest, annoying murderer) and I really had to keep myself awake and sit through this piece of crap. Even that other bad movie "The Beast From The Cellar" is better then this one. Ladies and gentlemen, AVOID this one. A movie that shows you how paint is drying, is much more exciting!

SPOILERS INCLUDED In 1972 sex and horror movie magazine Cinema X ran an article entitled 'How do you like your screen dollies? A-lively or..dead'. The article juxtaposed stills from Ray Selfe's Sweet and Sexy to represent 'A-lively' and stills from The Fiend to represent 'dead'. The Fiend press pack sent to Cinema X evidently consisting of little more than stills of dead, topless actresses either drowned, buried in cement or in one grisly case hung up on a meat hook. The article was subheaded 'one thing director Robert Hartford-Davis can do. He can sure make a corpse look sexy'.In fact Hartford-Davis was no stranger to sex and death cinema, having directed what's believed to be Britain's first story-driven sexploitation film (The Yellow Teddybears-1963). In the horror film arena he'd directed the infamous Corruption(1967), in which you get to see Peter Cushing butchering a prostitute and Carry On-starlet Alexandra Dane discovering a severed head in a fridge. Although dated today Corruption was the first sign (or warning if you will) of a grittier strain of horror films that would come into force in the 1970's. Hartford-Davis' final horror film The Fiend concerns the Brethren an evangelical movement under the command of 'The Minister' (Patrick Magee). Birdy (Ann Todd) a spinster has dedicated her life to the Brethren which includes handing her house over to the minister for his meetings (and what a motley crew the Brethren are). Her son Kenny (Tony Beckley) ups the ante by murdering women in an attempt to save their souls. Kenny also records his killings on audio-tape, later playing them back while having introspective conversations with his victim's bras. Supporting his mother by having duel jobs as a lifeguard and a security officer Kenny also uses these two occupations to further his third career as a serial killer. Outraged when a girl takes her top off at the pool Kenny follows her home with murder on his mind 'the day of retribution is at hand'. His security officer getup also comes in handy when terrorizing Hammersmith prostitutes. In one brutal sequence, Kenny disrupts one such woman servicing some old geezer, and before beating her around the head with a truncheon the 'nutcase bloody bible thumper' jams a torch into the girl's mouth. Which given the way we're introduced to the prostitute character in the film leaves little to the imagination as to what that torch is perversely symbolic of. Birdy takes an instant dislike to Brigitte a local nurse hired to care for the fail old woman. Brigitte is genuinely troubled by the Brethren, particularly the minister's rule forbidding the use of medicine since Birdy is a diabetic and closet insulin user. Brigitte's sister Paddy a chain-smoking journalist encouraged by her kin to write an expose of the Brethren, poses as an unwed mother-to-be in order to join the fold. Her appearance seems to bring out long repressed desire in Birdy and when the minister finds out she's been having 'foul thoughts' he orders Birdy to fast effectively issuing a death sentence to the diabetic. A desperate rush to administer her an insulin shot ensues, Paddy tries but is inadvertently stopped by Kenny, who locks her in the cellar. Finally standing up to the bullying minister Kenny storms upstairs to administer the shot, but he's too late to save her and literally exerts some biblical vengeance on the minister. Hartford-Davis was apparently driven to make The Fiend after being upset by reports of religious fanatics who forbid their followers the use of blood transfusions and medicine. The resulting film spares you none of his anger, but is also evidence of his exploiteer's eye for a good story milked for all its topical and sensationist worth. Brigitte seems to act as Hartford-Davis' mouthpiece when upon being told religion isn't that cool a subject in the Seventies she replies 'but this is different its so sick something ought to be done about those crank religions'. Inevitably today the film is usually spoken about in the same breath as the films of Pete Walker, particularly The House of Mortal Sin(1975) which similarly works religious iconology into its death scenes. Even though it was made at a time when Walker was just emerging from his School For Sex/nudie-cutie era, The Fiend anticipates Walker's heavy handed use of 'messages' and even his nuances for a headstrong heroine and an ineffectual male hero (amusingly played here by Ronald 'Uncle Quentin' Allen). Censor cuts inflicted on the film largely eliminated the angle the Cinema X article was written from. However in the uncensored print (surprisingly shown recently on UK TV!) the female nudity from actresses pretending to be dead, adds another unhealthy layer to the film. Tony Beckley (who died of cancer in 1980) is hard to fault as Kenny, Beckley also looks the part and his gaunt, sickly features would result in some memorable character bits in the period like the alcoholic in The Lost Continent(1968) and one of the gangsters in Get Carter(1971). It seems likely Beckley was cast here on account of his turn in 'british roughie' The Penthouse(1968) where he played a similar loose screw (who could forget his five minute rant about baby alligators). Another much missed actor Patrick Magee is equally memorable, relishing the minister's fire and brimstone monologues as only Magee could. And The Fiend sits alongside the varied likes of A Clockwork Orange, Dr Jekyll and the Women and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End as film's benefiting greatly from the work of this eccentric, intense actor. Although not without its fair share of tedium, The Fiend stands as one of the more interesting films in Hartford-Davis' hot and cold filmography. Wildly out of place musical numbers from one of the Brethren ('sing sister') recorded in an echo chamber, as well as the idea that Ann Todd on a church organ could produce the funky track 'wash me in his blood' are rare funny moments in another wise dark and bleak piece of work indeed.