Amicus made movies in a couple of different genres - musicals, art house, sci fi, action - but were best known for their horrors, in particular their anthology horror movies of which this was the first. It was a hit and they would go on to make a bunch over the next decade.
It has the benefit of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the lead. Cushing is a wacky professor who reads the tarot cards of five different men on a train resulting in five different stories (it's a shame one of them couldn't have been a woman, but there you go...)
The stories are all genuinely different: there's a werewof lurking in the cellar and determined to get payback on the owner of a house; a killer plant that attacks a family home; a jazz musician who messes with some voodoo; a severed hand of an artist that goes after an art critic; a man who realises he's married to a vampire.
It's stylishly directed by Freddie Francis and looks very handsome (Alan Hume is the DOP). The script is also very smart and well written; it's not the most original thing in the world - Day of the Triffids and The Beast with Five Fingers were surely influences - but its original enough. And there's a very satisfactory final twist at the end.
It does lack star power - key roles are played by people who aren't exactly names such as Roy Castle, Neil McCallum and Alan Freeman. However there are appearances by Bernard Lee, Michael Gough and a young Donald Sutherland (as a man who is awfully easy to convince that he should murder his wife because she's a vampire)..
No comments:
Post a Comment