John Urling Clark & Robin Beresford Evans – The Experiment

John Urling Clark & Robin Beresford Evans – The Experiment (Sphere, 1979)

From out of the lake of nightmares it came … the chilling, horrific creation of a twisted scientist with a sinister Nazi past.”

“Twisted” doesn’t begin to do him justice.

At the close of the war, Karl Heinrich Von Stansfield destroys the few survivors of his brutal experiments at Saschenhausen and surrenders himself to the Americans. His captors are prepared to overlook his war crimes because they’re particularly keen that he continues his work on modifyiing man’s breathing aparatus so that he can survive on water as opposed to air.

Relocated to a US airforce base at Marsden, Hampshire in the present day, the aged Nazi creates his abomination which inevitably absconds to the marshes. The man who was once known as  Sheldon is none-too mobile and spends much of his time breathing frothily into his tubes and hunting for victims. 

“Now a nerve-twisting shock-movie” boasts the cover: “The Video Film Partnership in association with Amaranth … starring Vivien Wolf as the Doctor, Helen Gill as the wife, Richard Marner as the Nazi Scientist.” A quarter of a century later, we’re still waiting to see it.