A dashing young antiques collector and expert in ancient artifacts goes looking for his missing brother in the remote village of Greymarsh. There, he finds a sinister old house amid dark and twisted woods, Messrs. Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff, Barbara Steele wearing green paint, and evidence lying everywhere that some kind of secret Satanic cult is at work. In all seriousness, could horror buffs ask for more?
Well yeah how about a reasonably decent movie?
I wish this one worked for me, but it doesn't. It has its moments, but that's the best you can say for a movie which, considering the talent involved, should have been much better, while the 'with-it' adornments of the most overrated decade in human history only add salt to the wound.
To start with, the stars are criminally underused. Lee walks around looking po-faced and drinks an awful lot of brandy, but never says much, and when he finally does, it doesn't make a great deal of sense (this was yet another of his movies that he disowned in later years). Karloff, though he still has immense presence, is little more than a very grand red herring, while Barbara Steele, who has equal presence, isn't actually in it she only appears in several weird hallucinations. Michael Gough also features, but once again is wasted in this case (and not for the first or last time in his career) playing a mumbling oddball manservant. The bulk of the screen-time is hogged by younger leads, Mark Eden, who is woefully bland and uninteresting as hero Robert Manning, and Virginia Wetherell, who admittedly looks as good nude as she does clothed (and that's saying something for movies of this period), but again is little more than a walking-talking plot device.
Speaking of plot, there are way too many contrivances on show here: Manning finally discovers that his missing brother was at Greymarsh after all because, half way through the film, he suddenly remembers that his brother often used an alias while travelling and surprise surprise, people then remember him. In another silly contrivance, Manning, having been hypnotised and sent to take his own life, is about to drown himself in a woodland pond when a passing policeman (in a deep forest, in the middle of the night!) intervenes and saves him. But worst of all is the moment when Manning, who's been sleepwalking outside, enters heroine Eve Morley's bedroom in a daze, and because he's cold, is advised by the accommodating lass not to don a dressing-gown, or even to put his pyjama top back on but to get in her bed so that he can warm himself.
You don't need to be a student of life to correctly surmise what's going to happen next.
I suppose it's an interesting enough premise, in a traditional, clichéd sort of way: Demonic power from times past reaches out and avenges itself (herself in this case Lavinia, the Black Witch of Greymarsh, burned in the 17th century) on the descendants of its enemies. Traditionally-themed horror films were still in vogue at the time, so much can be forgiven. But it was a big mistake to try and contemporise it, because if there's one era that's dated very badly on celluloid it's the politically incorrect 1960s. Suddenly we're out of that ageless Edwardian time-loop where so many films of this sort dwell, and into an equally unrecognisable world where naked girls giggle as packs of fully clothed men hunt them through the night-time forest, and the hero's main technique when it comes to seducing the heroine is simply to grab her almost as soon as he's met her and force his tongue into her mouth (to which, needless to say, she doesn't really object).
It's also the era of psychedelica, and there's the rub. In fact there's the whole story. Psychedelica is at the root of almost everything mysterious in this movie, though bewilderingly, when we actually get to a wild 1960s party, there's nothing stronger on show than some very bad clothes, some champagne and a few spinning, coloured lights.
Possibly because of this almost complete absence of hallucinogenic drugs (though, quite confusingly, a drugs-warning is given at the beginning of the movie), the final revelation - that Lavinia only exists in the mind of a madman, and in the delirium of people he's mesmerised (with his spinning, coloured lamp) - seems so out of place in what started out as a standard devil-worship romp that you can't help wondering if it was tagged on belatedly to try and appeal to a groovier audience.
At the end of the day, it isn't desperately bad. Despite the hugely disappointing finale, the film is nicely shot in very autumnal English settings, there's a genuine feeling of isolation about the house and village, and it does have Karloff and Lee, who always add kudos.
Don't give it too wide a berth; if nothing else it should remind you of that easier age in horror when every English village was full of diabolists, every old manor house was riddled with secret passages, and women executed for witchcraft were invariably guilty as charged.
Well yeah how about a reasonably decent movie?
I wish this one worked for me, but it doesn't. It has its moments, but that's the best you can say for a movie which, considering the talent involved, should have been much better, while the 'with-it' adornments of the most overrated decade in human history only add salt to the wound.
To start with, the stars are criminally underused. Lee walks around looking po-faced and drinks an awful lot of brandy, but never says much, and when he finally does, it doesn't make a great deal of sense (this was yet another of his movies that he disowned in later years). Karloff, though he still has immense presence, is little more than a very grand red herring, while Barbara Steele, who has equal presence, isn't actually in it she only appears in several weird hallucinations. Michael Gough also features, but once again is wasted in this case (and not for the first or last time in his career) playing a mumbling oddball manservant. The bulk of the screen-time is hogged by younger leads, Mark Eden, who is woefully bland and uninteresting as hero Robert Manning, and Virginia Wetherell, who admittedly looks as good nude as she does clothed (and that's saying something for movies of this period), but again is little more than a walking-talking plot device.
Speaking of plot, there are way too many contrivances on show here: Manning finally discovers that his missing brother was at Greymarsh after all because, half way through the film, he suddenly remembers that his brother often used an alias while travelling and surprise surprise, people then remember him. In another silly contrivance, Manning, having been hypnotised and sent to take his own life, is about to drown himself in a woodland pond when a passing policeman (in a deep forest, in the middle of the night!) intervenes and saves him. But worst of all is the moment when Manning, who's been sleepwalking outside, enters heroine Eve Morley's bedroom in a daze, and because he's cold, is advised by the accommodating lass not to don a dressing-gown, or even to put his pyjama top back on but to get in her bed so that he can warm himself.
You don't need to be a student of life to correctly surmise what's going to happen next.
I suppose it's an interesting enough premise, in a traditional, clichéd sort of way: Demonic power from times past reaches out and avenges itself (herself in this case Lavinia, the Black Witch of Greymarsh, burned in the 17th century) on the descendants of its enemies. Traditionally-themed horror films were still in vogue at the time, so much can be forgiven. But it was a big mistake to try and contemporise it, because if there's one era that's dated very badly on celluloid it's the politically incorrect 1960s. Suddenly we're out of that ageless Edwardian time-loop where so many films of this sort dwell, and into an equally unrecognisable world where naked girls giggle as packs of fully clothed men hunt them through the night-time forest, and the hero's main technique when it comes to seducing the heroine is simply to grab her almost as soon as he's met her and force his tongue into her mouth (to which, needless to say, she doesn't really object).
It's also the era of psychedelica, and there's the rub. In fact there's the whole story. Psychedelica is at the root of almost everything mysterious in this movie, though bewilderingly, when we actually get to a wild 1960s party, there's nothing stronger on show than some very bad clothes, some champagne and a few spinning, coloured lights.
Possibly because of this almost complete absence of hallucinogenic drugs (though, quite confusingly, a drugs-warning is given at the beginning of the movie), the final revelation - that Lavinia only exists in the mind of a madman, and in the delirium of people he's mesmerised (with his spinning, coloured lamp) - seems so out of place in what started out as a standard devil-worship romp that you can't help wondering if it was tagged on belatedly to try and appeal to a groovier audience.
At the end of the day, it isn't desperately bad. Despite the hugely disappointing finale, the film is nicely shot in very autumnal English settings, there's a genuine feeling of isolation about the house and village, and it does have Karloff and Lee, who always add kudos.
Don't give it too wide a berth; if nothing else it should remind you of that easier age in horror when every English village was full of diabolists, every old manor house was riddled with secret passages, and women executed for witchcraft were invariably guilty as charged.