"Horror of the Black Museum" is incredibly dated, unimportant and overly silly but it remains great fun to watch and watch it again. The opening sequence is delicious and definitely the best part of the entire movie. It involves the supposedly third strange and random murder in the London region and shows a poor woman getting her eyes gouged out by a pair of ingeniously spiked binoculars. A better opening to a colorful horror movie is hard to imagine and you're automatically preparing yourself to see a blackly comical and sadist horror gem. The quality-level of this intro naturally can't be held up throughout the entire movie but the script remains involving and surprising enough to keep you amused for a good 80 minutes. Scotland Yard hasn't got a clue where to begin their investigation and on top of that they're constantly annoyed by the vain columnist and pulp-novelist Ed Bancroft. The mysterious killer's identity isn't kept secret for long (I even assume it wasn't meant to be a secret) but his/her insane persona is imaginatively deepened. The "Black Museum" is a technical term to describe the police archive of bizarre and unusual murder weapons that were used in murder cases. The killer here has such a private collection himself which provides the film with a couple of utterly cool gimmicks, like the previously mentioned binoculars, an acid-bath and even a mini-guillotine! Michael Gough is seemly having a great time portraying the cripple cynic Bancroft. His performance is more than decent yet I agree with another reviewer here who already claimed that this role would be even more fit for Vincent Price. This film was the first entry of a Sadian horror trilogy, the others being the 1960 "Circus of Horrors" and "Peeping Tom". "Horror of the Black Museum" is the weakest of the three but still a terrifically odd and sensational genre highlight.
Review of Horrors of the Black Museum
