The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

Directed by Peter Duffell. Starring Denholm Elliott, Peter Cushing, Jon Pertwee, Christoper Lee, John Bennett, John Bryans, Joanna Dunham, Ingrid Pitt, Chloe Franks, Joss Ackland, Nyree Dawn Porter, Geoffrey Bayldon, Tom Adams. [PG]

Easily the weakest of Amicus’ British horror anthologies, this four-part chiller has a good cast for the material, but nary a fright, precious few fresh ideas, and middle-of-the-road direction and production values for its kind. Best segment comes at the beginning with Denholm Elliott as a horror writer inspired—and then disturbed—by visions of a psychotic strangler. Others involve a naughty child dabbling in witchcraft/voodoo, an all-too-obvious wax museum mystery easily solved by anyone even remotely familiar with House of Wax and its ilk, and a cloak that turns its wearer into a vampire. Framing sequences lack an ironic payoff, replete with a cheesy fourth-wall break at the very end. The collection’s title evokes more macabre shivers than anything contained within, and as depicted, the horrifying hallucinations in multiple episodes don’t cut it. Only for those who just can’t get enough of the milieu of 60s and 70s skin-crawlers out of old Britannia. Stories by Robert Bloch.

44/100