Horrors of the Black Museum

After a chilling beginning, Arthur Crabtree’s final feature film gets lost in the myriad twists and turns of a plot that’s anything but original (you get the impression you’re watching an adaptation of an Edgar Wallace crime novel spiced up with a dash of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”). The inventiveness of the murders, which should be the main highlight of the film, gradually recedes into the background until it’s finally abandoned altogether in a rushed ending that reeks of anticlimax.

As far as the cast is concerned, the over-the-top performance of the always fascinating Michael Gough takes center stage as he fills the role of a larger-than-life character seemingly written specifically with Vincent Price in mind. There’s plenty of dialogue, but beyond a few pungent reflections on the media’s tendency towards sensationalism, it all boils down to one madman’s ravings and contempt for the fairer sex. Questionable lines such as “Never put any trust in a woman“, and “They’re all a vicious, unreliable breed“, combined with a backdrop of persistent misogyny against the film’s female characters (all uninhibited young women), produces an overall result that leaves something to be desired.

The film, produced by the British company Anglo-Amalgamated, represents the first chapter of a so-called “Sadian trilogy” (the others were “Circus of Horrors” and “Peeping Tom”, both released in 1960).