Rating: C-
Dir: Roy Ward Baker
Star: Dawn Addams, Tom Baker, Michael Craig, Denholm Elliott
This is the fourth Amicus anthology I’ve seen, and it’s certainly my least favorite. The disappointment was palpable, considering the same director was responsible for Asylum, made the previous year and far superior. Can’t complain about the casting which, as usual, is a parade of well-recognized British (and other) actors of the time. As well as those listed above, here you also get Glynis Johns, Curd Jürgens, Terry-Thomas and even Arthur Mullard as a gravedigger. However, of the five stories, only one is more than trivial. As for the wrap-around story, if you’ve seen other Amicus movies, you will be very easily able to work out where it’s going, before it gets there.
The first, Midnight Mess, demonstrates the problems, in which a greedy brother goes in search of his sister with inheritance-based murder on his mind, only to find the town where she lives is… different. Of all the places this could have gone, it ends up at the one most likely to provoke an “Is that it?” reaction. The next, The Neat Job, is even flimsier, a man with OCD finding his new wife isn’t up the same standards. Until the final shot (top – insert “splitting headache” joke here), it’s more slapstick comedy. This Trick’ll Kill You, sees a magician try to steal the secret of the Indian Rope Trick, and Bargain in Death sees a man try to fake his own death for life insurance purposes. Neither will stick in the mind.
It does, at least, save the best for last with Drawn and Quartered. There are shades of Theater of Blood, which came out a couple of months later, with Baker playing aggrieved painter Moore. He wants to take revenge on those who have refused to recognize his artistic talents, from an art critic through to a sales agent. To this end, he uses Haitian black magic to make damage to his paintings affect the subjects of them. It’s by no means subtle, but does at least have an extended nasty streak to it, appropriate to the source material from EC Comics. Naturally, he who sets the voodoo painting, gets the voodoo painting. In hindsight, probably a mistake to have done a self-portrait.
I do note it’s the only Amicus anthology in which Peter Cushing doesn’t appear (due to a scheduling conflict), though I don’t think that’s the problem here. Either Milton Subotsky did a poor job adapting the comic strips written by Bill Gaines, or the original stories weren’t up to much to begin with. Perhaps they’d already mined all the good stuff for previous anthologies, and were left It may not help that they are explicitly stated to be dreams, which weakens their impact (though to be fair, the ending throws this into question). It’s also a little relentless in its “bad people get their just deserts” theme. While I get that was a key element of EC comics, by the end of this, I felt thoroughly in dead horse territory.