a well-turned story) and Duffell changes modes from taut little Blochian psycho piece (“Method for Murder”) through romantic- perverse (“Waxwork,” also done on THRILLER) and sinister-cyni- cal (“Sweets to the Sweet”) to farcical (“The Cloak”). The punchline, which is supposed to explain the link between the sto- ries, is limp and the placing of the comedy episode at the end almost obscures the eerieness that has gone before; but it’s an excellent anthology, carrying over from the Bloch-scripted ASYLUM a sense of real pain and confusion among the various vic- tims and perpetrators that is an advance on the stick figures of DR. TERROR. Subotsky’s star- casting gambit pays off with the grace notes struck by Denholm Elliott as a gloomy thriller-writer driven mad by what he assumes are the phantasmal appearances of the psychotic (Tom Adams) from his latest book; Cushing and Joss Ackland as a pair of wistful, doomed, oddball “retired stockbrokers” smitten with a wax figure of Salome (and, eventu- ally, an axe); Chloe Franks as an angelic and persecuted child with a nasty side; and Pertwee and Ingrid Pitt (her most likeable screen turn, as a version of her- self) as cut-rate horror divas who transform into genuine vampires for an episode that seems a sus- tained dig at the degradation of Hammer’s product circa SCARS OF DRACULA.
The transfer is 1.85:1, en- hanced for 16:9. A featurette, A- RATED HORROR FILM, includes interview material with Duffell, Franks, Pitt and Geoffrey Bayldon (who plays the vam- pire proprietor of the costume shop where Pertwee finds his cloak), but the title isn’t ex- plained until you get to Duffell’s commentary track, where he tells interviewer Jonathan Rigby
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that the original cut was almost given the BBFC’s lenient A-rat- ing rather than the intended AA or eventual, commercially-nec- essary X. Duffell maintains that he’s embarrassed by the title and would have preferred to use DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, grumbling that Rosenberg stuck him with THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD though there’s no blood on view (Rigby quite properly sticks up for the
accepted moniker). A similar mat- ter comes up on the ...AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS! track, where director Roy Ward Baker and star Stephanie Beacham both lament the junking of the shoot- ing title (BRIDE OF FENGRIFFEN, though David Case’s novel was just called FENGRIFFEN). Rosen- berg, in the general INSIDE THE FEAR FACTORY featurette on the ASYLUM disc, gets his own say in the matter, arguing for
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