Continuing with my personal TP Haloween schedule, I started watching Horrors Of The Black Museum. Blow me down if it isn't the AIP distributed version with a twelve minute intro following the opening credits by an 'expert' rambling on about hypnotism and auto-suggestion, concluding with "In five minutes from now you will be so terrified that you will be unable to supress a scream of terror... Imagine you are in London, that weird, mysterious, ancient city...."
After 45 minutes I feel unable to supress a yawn of boredom.
Having now rewatched the entire picture, I have to wonder what it was that made this less than the sum of its parts. Certainly it's a veritable patchwork of elements ripped off from other films and ends up being a series of macabre vignettes tenuously linked by a rambling and none too feasible script. A mishmash of Edgar Wallace krimi, Jekyll and Hyde, Rue Morgue and mad doctoring, it's all of these and somehow none of them. Gough is ideal for the overripe hamming needed to carry such a ludicrous piece of exaggerated cartoon villainy (even if the script does rather overdo the crude misogyny), but the rest of the cast is terrible. Especially Shirley Ann(e) Field - but then again it would be ingenuous to expect any degree of acting competence from the female Julian Sands of her day. The murders are gruesome in conception but not in cinematic execution and the long interlude establishing the character of the villain's moll, complete with excrutiatingly naff dancing and tipsy hard luck story hardly acheives what I assume was its aim of making the girl a sympathetic character and thus her grisly demise more shocking. All in all it feels like a case of getting from A to B via X, Y and Z.