The only person who knows about Bancroft’s
macabre collection is his teenage assistant Rick (Graham Curnow). Rick’s obviously not as sharp as the audience, because he never realizes that his fame-hungry boss is obviously connected to the serial massacres around London [warning, spoilers ahead!], but maybe that’s because Rick plays an even bigger part in the crimes – as the killer! Hypnotized by Bancroft and ordered to carry out sensationalistic violent crimes to boost his column’s readership, Rick is soon outed as the zombie-like slasher and Bancroft his evil puppet master in a thrilling amusement park cli- max. More than 50 years after it was released, Hor-
Curiosities Kill HORRORS OF THE
BLACK MUSEUM (1959) DVD Starring Michael Gough, June Cunningham and Graham Curnow Directed by Arthur Crabtree Written by Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel VCI
Producer Herman Cohen had made a big
bloody splash in the late 1950s with pubescent terrors I Was a Teenage Werewolf and How to Make a Monster, but he really went all out for Horrors of the Black Museum. Though shot in widescreen and colour, his 1959 Hammer-influ- enced follow-up is anything but classy; in fact, it’s one of the most lurid schlock chillers of the 1950s. Combining brutal bloodshed, an outra- geous lead performance by British genre master Michael Gough and a gimmicky come-on called “Hypnovista,” there’s nothing subtle about Cohen’s delicious slice of Grand Guignol cheese- cake. At its most basic level, Horrors of the Black
Museummay have sprouted from the hackneyed plots of classic chillers (the dialogue even name- checks Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but its innova- tive approach to a maniac slaughtering innocent victims is definitely a few decades ahead of its
RM100 R E I S S U E S
time. A clear ancestor of the slasher film, its compendium of unusual, violent deaths is sup- posedly modelled on real-life murder weapons collected in Scotland Yard’s off-limits “Black Mu- seum.” One of these deadly objects christens the film
with an uncomfortable squish. A young woman receives a pair of binoculars from an unknown admirer, with a special hidden surprise: spring- loaded spikes that drive right through her eyes and pierce her brain. At the police station, crime reporter Edmond Ban- croft (Gough) eagerly gathers all the facts of this grisly event for his newspaper column. But Bancroft is more than just a meticulous journalist, he’s obsessed with murder and mayhem, aggressively badg- ering detectives, visiting his doctor to cope with heart pal- pitations as the body count rises, and purchasing daggers and other implements of death at second-hand stores. These latter items are displayed in Ban- croft’s basement, which houses his very own se- cret black museum showcasing evidence from unsolved crimes.
rors of the Black Museum still retains some of its gut-wrenching sadism. The binoculars scene will always be the film’s most famous, but Cohen and frequent screenwriting collaborator Aben Kandel follow up this shock opener with a portable guillotine that slices off the head of a blonde floozy and ice tongs that are applied to the head of an unscrupulous antique dealer. Oth- ers that threaten to expose Bancroft are electro- cuted, strangled and dipped in an acid bath. Although these scenes aren’t necessarily graphic, their over-the-top nastiness is still enough to make them memorable for modern viewers. Yet Gough refuses to be upstaged by the grue-
some deaths, portraying Bancroft with all-out sinister bombast that emphasizes the film’s camp cruelty. Playing a role originally written for Vincent Price, Gough dominates the picture as he launches into shrill ferocity and spits out bit- ter, misogynistic asides. Less effective is the “Hypnovista” pre-credits
gimmick, in which an office-bound psychologist lays out an unconvincing argu- ment on the power of hypno- tism and even tries some rudimentary hypnosis on the audience. It’s a bit of William Castle-inspired lunacy that sounds great splashed across a poster but, at a patience-testing fifteen minutes in length, prob- ably bored patrons anxious for the action to start. Horrors of the Black Museum
was previously exhibited by VCI Entertainment on a 2003 DVD, but this new re-release – which
pairs it with another Cohen production, the goofy spook comedy The Headless Ghost – is an ex- cellent chance for viewers to get reacquainted with the film’s malevolent delights.
PAUL CORUPE
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