-Grindhouse Fest spotlights the cult gems, sleaze classics, and deranged wonders that defined exploitation cinema’s golden run. Proceed with delight and caution-
Directed by Robert Hartford-Davies
Written by Derek Ford and Donald Ford
Starring:
- Peter Cushing as Sir John Rowan
- Sue Lloyd as Lynn Nolan
- Noel Trevarthen as Steve Harris
- Kate O’Mara as Val Nolan
- David Lodge as Groper
- Anthony Booth as Mike Orme
Rating: 
Seeing Peter Cushing step out of his gothic mansion and into mod-era London is already a weird little shock. But Corruption, under Hartford-Davis, gets even stranger: not only does it throw Cushing into a hip, contemporary world he seems allergic to, it drags him through some of the nastiest, most over-the-top violence of his career. It’s Cushing, but sleazier, sweatier, and way more unhinged than anything Hammer ever let him do.
Cushing steps in as John Rowan, a hotshot plastic surgeon head-over-heels for a gorgeous model half his age, Lynn (Sue Lloyd). They’re ready to tie the knot and live the dream—until the universe pulls the rug out with savage flair. At a hip, sweaty youth party—where Cushing wanders around like the world’s politest time traveler—Lynn poses for photos, only for a scorching light bulb to drop straight onto her face. Half her beauty gone in seconds. From there, the movie goes full exploitation-mode, tearing into themes of beauty obsession in a way that echoes Eyes Without a Face, only without the arthouse sheen. Forget metaphysics—this one’s all meat, madness, and messed-up flesh.
Cushing’s surgeon—a role he attacks with a startling, near-unhinged commitment—throws away his prestigious standing to restore his fiancée’s beauty through methods that are about as illegal as they are grotesque. The film’s sleazier aspects aren’t groundbreaking for grindhouse fare, but seeing Cushing knee-deep in such scuzzy terrain is its own perverse novelty. His portrayal of obsession is the real standout: surprisingly tender, wounded, and terrifying all at once. After years of embodying Frankenstein’s ruthless obsession, one might expect a similar energy here, but Corruption twists that expectation. This time, Cushing’s character becomes the victim of obsession rather than its architect. The film’s most incisive turn lies in the revelation that Sue Lloyd’s seemingly delicate Lynn is, in fact, the true monster—vain, manipulative, and entirely consumed by an ideal of beauty so rigid that she’s willing to coax her besotted partner into murder for the sake of her own cosmetic resurrection.
Cushing never plays Rowan as a calculating murderer but rather as a frail man adrift, someone unable to govern his own emotional storms. When he seeks out potential victims, he pauses on the brink of violence, visibly torn between morality and the obsessive pull Lynn exerts over him. Yet his fixation on her statuesque beauty ultimately overwhelms his conscience. The film’s canted angles and feverish visual design further heighten his unraveling, staging the violence as a kind of delirious hallucination rather than grounded brutality. For a work so salacious and stripped-down, Corruption might have thrived as a straightforward sleaze piece, but its tangled narrative conjectures overcomplicate the finale and veer into pretension. The ambiguous ending will strike some as bold and others as absurd; I fall squarely in the latter camp. Still, Cushing’s performance fascinates—he elevates the film beyond mere provocation, giving it the charge of subconscious menace where repressed urges claw to the surface. How he ever agreed to appear in such tawdry material remains a mystery, but I’m genuinely grateful he did.
*One more thing, this movie has one of the most stupidly awful taglines ever put on an exploitation movie poster: “Corruption” is not a woman’s picture! Therefore, no woman will be admitted alone to see this super-shock film!
