American production company Seven Arts made a number of horror and fantasy movies in Britain in association with Hammer Film Productions, but here is one they without them. They ponied up enough money for a decent name to play the lead - Roddy McDowall, who works for a museum where one of the exhibits is a Golem.
The plot is a little like Bucket of Blood - McDowall uses the creature to climb up the museum ranks to be a curator, and also romance a girl (Jill Haworth). That's not a bad structure, and McDowall had already shown in Lord Love a Duck that he had a neat line in creepy Tony Perkins types who would do anything for love. (In that mode the film throws in a subplot where McDowall looks after the widowed skeleton of his mother in a rocking chair).
But the execution is underwhelming. The goals of getting the job and the woman don't neatly dovetail the way they do in Bucket of Blood - Haworth doesn't care he's curator; indeed, she's more interested in someone else, a dull Canadian called Paul Maxwell. (Although another of this movie's problems is there is no build with that relationship either - one minute they're just together making out).
You wait for McDowall's personality to change through owning the Golem but it doesn't; he starts off weird and a thief and just gets weirder. The Golem itself doesn't have any personality; I think you're meant to - for some reason it lets Haworth live - but it never comes across. The finale involves the Golem running riot and everyone panicking but since we don't see any of it we don't care; then the British army drop a nuclear bomb on McDowall and we're cheated out of a death scene.
So it's part Psycho, part Frankenstein, part Bucket of Blood - but the result is a mess, and a waste of decent production values and McDowall. Jill Haworth does show some side boob.
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