A pall hangs like a shroud, like a shrouded, foggy, hanging pall hanging over the towns of Shtetl, Crythin, and Castle Andomye.  The wind howls through the trees like a howling, windy thing.  A bird flies over our heads — but wait!  Was that a bird — or was it a bat?  Nope, it was a bird.  Anyway, there’s that pall again…


THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989)
Written by Nigel Kneale  Directed by Herbert Wise

Young, happily married, and a father of two, Arthur Kidd (Adrian Rawlins) is sent by his law firm to handle the estate of the late Mrs. Dablow at her isolated home in the coastal town of Crythin.  Meeting a local lawyer in the town where the woman lived and died, Kidd is told that Miss Dablow would not be mourned by anyone else, so he is surprised to see a woman standing off by herself in the cemetery.  But when he draws his colleague’s attention to the isolated woman in black, the small town lawyer becomes agitated, and the woman disappears.  The mystery deepens when Kidd spends his first foggy afternoon in Eel Marsh Manor and hears the sounds of an awful carriage crash — with no one in sight.
This British television film has a reputation for being frightening, in the vein of THE HAUNTING or THE INNOCENTS, and while not quite up to the artistic merits or big budget of those two classic features, it’s reputation for being scary is entirely deserved.  I will not present any spoilers in this review — the unexpected is essential to the nature of this kind of story — but I will tell you that the title character is a vision you will not soon forget.  The intelligent script by the great Nigel Kneale (creator of the Quatermass series) lends a new polish to the venerable ghost story, and the production’s use of sound is inventive, from its audible ghosts to the sniffing noise made by the manor house’s generator. The locations used for the isolated manor are brilliant and evocative.  Adrian Rawlins as protagonist Arthur Kidd is the unique male in jeopardy in this ghost story, convincing and sympathetic, and Pauline Moran as the silent Woman in Black deserves to be ranked with Max Shreck for her other-worldly characterization.  (Viewed on a collectors’ market DVD thoughtfully supplied to me by Bobbie Culbertson of the Yahoo Lost Skeleton Message Board.)


THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (1967)
Written by Manfred R. Kohler  Directed by Harald Reindl

Judge von Marienberg (mustachioed Lex Barker) sentences Frederick, Count Regula (Christopher Lee) to be drawn and quartered, placing a spiked happy-face mask on the condemned man’s head.  Thirty-five years later, Roger Mont Elise (clean-shaven Lex Barker), who never knew his parents or his birth name, receives an invitation to visit a stranger, Count Regula, at Castle Andomye.  On his journey there, he meets Lillian von Brabant (Karin Dor), who has also received the same invitation from a man she, like him, does not know.  Their journey takes them through a surreal fog shrouded forest, where inns mysteriously burn and collapse, corpses strew the road and body parts hang from trees.  This is a far better film than it deserves to be, with a genuine atmosphere of threatening magic, a handsome hero, beautiful heroine, and dastardly villain.  Barker and Lee dub their own lines, which helps their performances a lot, especially when Lee deadpans “This is a great moment for me” without the slightest trace of emotion; who said Lee doesn’t have a sense of humor?  Dor looks lovely in a flowing violet gown, the castle’s walls are decorated with imitations of Bosch’s visions of Hell, there are vultures, snakes, spiders, green blood, pits and pendulums, a little stop-motion, and the whole enterprise moves rapidly enough to entertain.  If only the musical score was on a par with the rest of the film; it scampers when it should darken the mood, meanders when it should build.  (Viewed on Legend House’s fine DVD, whose wide-screen print rescues the film from pan/scan Public Domain ugliness.)


VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972)
Written by Judson Kinberg  Directed by Robert Young

Talk about your High Concept title!  In the village of Shtetl, vampire Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman, resembling a Glitter Rock star) is ravaging the local girls with the assistance of Anna (Domini Blythe), wife of Schoolmaster Albert (Laurence Payne).  The villagers finally get fed up and storm the castle, led by the Schoolmaster and the Burgomeister (Thorley Walters).  They stake the Count but Anna manages to escape.  Fifteen years later, the village is again ravaged, this time by a plague that the local doctor believes is caused by the multitude of bats hanging out in the ruined castle of the Count.  “Yes, vampire bats!” says one villager.  The town is cut off from the outside world by a blockade; so when the traveling the Gypsy Woman’s (Adrienne Corri) Circus of Nights arrives, mysteriously side-stepping the blockade, the townspeople are grateful for the distracting entertainment; until their children begin to fall under the spell of the circus people.  In one of the last gasps of classic Hammer vampire stories, the tired formula has some energy pumped into it with good acting, simple but effective effects, and lots of blood, violence and nudity.

POSSIBLE BRIEF SPOILERS: Though the sequence in which a family is stalked in the woods by the Panther Man could have been milked for more suspense than it is here, memorable moments include the completely nude snake dancer (Serena of “The Webers”), the acrobatic tumbling twins who turn into bats in mid-air, and what seems to be the eyes of a panther in the bushes that turns out to be boot buckles.  END OF POSSIBLE BRIEF SPOILERS.

Overall, though none of these late Hammer vampire films deserve mention in the same breath with their earlier classics, this is, at least, a better film than any in the Karnstein trilogy, with heroes and victims who are young enough to be believably innocent and lend a strong air of pedophile decadence to the vampiric activities.  Though full-frame, the print I watched on OnDemand’s Impact Channel is, despite its PG rating, completely uncut, with all nudity, violence and gore intact, which makes it the first time U.S. audiences have been able to see the film in its uncut form.

— Robert Deveau
Der Verloren-Bauer