The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

 dir Haral Reinl lp Lex Barker, Karin Dor, Christopher Lee

Lee is Count Regula, an evil sorcerer in 18th century Germany who is attempting to gain immortality by sacrificing 13 virgins. After 12 murders, however, he is arrested and condemned to death. Just like Barbara Steele in Black Sunday (1960) he has a spiked mask hammered onto his face. Unlike in that case, however, this doesn't prove fatal and he is subsequently finished off by being pulled apart by four horses, but not before pronouncing a curse on his executioners.

Thirty-five years later, the Countess Lillian von Brabant (Dor) and her lawyer Roger Mont Elise travel to Count Regula's castle to collect an inheritance for the Countess. Once there, they are captured and imprisoned by servants of the Count, who manage to revive him. Regula announces that Lillian will be his 13th victim, but will first be psychologically and physically tortured.

The original title of this German film translates as The Snake Pit and the Pendulum and, indeed, Roger is tied down in a room with a giant, sharp-edged pendulum getting every closer as it swings back and forth above him and Lillian is trapped on a plank above a snake-and-spider filled pit that is slowly retracted, threating to pitch her in. The very profitable series of Poe adaptations by American International Pictures (AIP) had recently ended so it's not hard to see why the producers of this film might want to ride that wave. However, this is probably more of an imitation of Mario Bava's Italian gothics, like the aforementioned Black Sunday or Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) than it is of AIP's Poe films.

Like the Bava films, this emphasizes atmosphere and it does have some memorable images. The forest that Lillian and Roger travel through to reach Castle Regula is festooned with corpses hanging from the trees and the corridors of the castle are lined with skulls. The mask hammered onto Regula's face and which he is still wearing when revived seems a definite Bava influence. Unlike the demonic mask used in Black Sunday, however, this mask bears more than a passing resemblance to the famous '70s icon, the 'have a good day' smiley face, which gives the mask sequences an unintended air of parody.

That exemplifies the problem with this film. Although there is some effective atmosphere, for the most part it seems silly and cartoonish. Lee isn't given anything interesting to say (neither is anyone else) and the performances of the supporting actors, such as Vladimir Medar as a supposed comic-relief monk, are inadequate (though this could be the fault of the dubbing). Despite the English-language title (one of the most amusingly over-the-top of the era), this has little blood or gore. This is not in itself a bad thing, but the mildness of the film, combined with the weak script, makes this seem more like a live-action cartoon than a truly frightening horror film.

Blood of the Vampire (1958)

dir Henry Cass lp Donald Wolfit, Vincent Ball, Barbara Shelley, Victor Maddern

A deceptively titled (the lead character isn't really a vampire) early entry in the 1950s Gothic revival, this begins in Transylvania in 1874 with a burial in a remote mountain cemetery. Before the lid of the coffin is closed, a masked executioner pounds a stake into the heart of the corpse. A strange deformed man watches from concealment, waiting until everyone else has left, then killing the grave digger and (presumably) stealing the body. Later the deformed man, whose name is Carl, pays an alcoholic doctor to put a fresh heart in the body, then kills the doctor.

Later we meet John Pierre, a young doctor whose experiments with blood transfusion cause him to be unjustly convicted of malpractice and murder. Condemned to life in an island prison, he is diverted instead to a huge asylum for the criminally insane. The feared governor of the institution is Dr. Callistratus, who, of course, is the same person whose burial we witnessed at the beginning of the film. Because the wrong blood type was used during his revival, Callistratus suffers from a condition whereby, "one group of cells in my body is destroying the other." To try to find a cure, he's taking blood from unwilling donors among the inmate population, sometimes so much that it kills them. He enlists Pierre to help him in is experiments, granting him freedom to move about the asylum and to live in a comfortable bedroom rather than a dirty cell. When new evidence exonerates Pierre, Callistratus tells the court that Pierre has been killed in an escape attempt. This causes Pierre's beautiful wife, Madeleine, to infiltrate the asylum, posing as a housekeeper.

This is an imitation of the Hammer thrillers which were just beginning to become popular at the time it was made, but is not nearly as satisfying as films such as Horror of Dracula. It has many of the same trappings as the Hammer films, but the script and performances are not up to Hammer's standards (at least those of the legendary studio's best films) and the plot is a muddled mess. As Bill Warren says in his magisterial Keep Watching the Skies, it seems as though the writers put in as many horror tropes as possible, but failed to mold them into a coherent whole. In the end, it's only interesting as an example of Hammer's early influence and for a chance to see frequent Hammer performer Shelley in her first venture into Gothic horror.