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"Empty graves eventually tell their story." A burst of hot color prepares the dark-toned imagery to come, the African hut that gives way to the locked tower in Victorian England. A child's death in the colonial plantation is answered by the witch doctor's deforming curse, "sin and retribution," back home the misshapen aristocrat (Alister Williamson) is kept in chains by his sibling (Vincent Price). His escape plan involves a deathlike trance facilitated by the crooked lawyer (Peter Arne), he's entombed alive but delivered by graverobbers to the local physician (Christopher Lee). The visitor is quite the bump from the cadavers the doctor usually experiments on, the slitted hood he dons to go about his vengeful business reveals Whale's The Invisible Man as the mainstay. "It's all in the course of science, innit?" A vicious amalgamation of Poe themes, begun by Michael Reeves and completed by Gordon Hessler with his own particular brand of ferocity. Wide-angle subjective shots are prevalent, a nocturnal ambush at a crossroads is brightened by the crimson of the fiend's hood and the victim's wounds. A maniac but one "of the gentry," peering at a stolid upper-crust ballroom from the outside and then losing himself to a raucous plebeian carouse. A grimly topsy-turvy world, the delegate from the oppressed continent is after gold like everybody else, the old pastor is understanding of how a body-snatcher's hunger can take precedence over "a good mark in heaven." Imperialism is the malady, its corrosion is reflected at the close on the frozen eyes of complacent beauty. "Blood will have blood, so they say." Hessler reuses the cloaked disfigurement for the honorable Vizier in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. With Rupert Davies, Uta Levka, Sally Geeson, Hilary Dwyer, Maxwell Shaw, Carl Rigg, Harry Baird, Godfrey James, and John Barrie.
--- Fernando F. Croce |