kevinolzak Review of Horrors of the Black Museum

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

Michael Gough in a shocking starring debut

[7/10 · 4 April 2019]

1959's "Horrors of the Black Museum" marked producer Herman Cohen's shift from Hollywood to England, the very first AIP release in color and CinemaScope (double billed with Cohen's comedic "The Headless Ghost"), and its massive success was a major factor in the company's move away from black and white sci-fi to color Poe films. The William Castle-type gimmick of HypnoVista played a part at the box office but merely added 13 interminable minutes to the running time, usually trimmed for television (1960's "The Hypnotic Eye" called its similar process HypnoVision). It was the first of the infamous 'Sadean Trilogy' (followed by Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" and Anton Diffring's "Circus of Horrors"), forward looking pictures that centered around the killers, all emphasizing sadism, depravity, and sexually charged violence against women (Anglo Amalgamated the production company doing the honors). It's no stretch to admit that this was the weakest of the three, Cohen's trademark misogyny firmly in place (with one exception, all the victims are female), and yet another teenage boy under the hypnotic control of a psychotic older male (the producer went back to the well one time too many with 1961's "Konga"). While "Peeping Tom" has long been acknowledged as an enduring classic, its shy protagonist unable to resist a compulsion to kill, and "Circus of Horrors" is acclaimed for the backdrop of joviality masking its sordid tale of an obsessive plastic surgeon using the big top as the perfect front for his facial experiments, "Black Museum" can offer little apart from the old hat Cohen clichés established in "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," namely dull footage showing the hapless authorities always a step behind the culprit, this mastermind supplying Michael Gough with his first starring role, a more economical choice than either Vincent Price or Orson Welles. The gruesome opening is the best remembered moment, and no wonder; the tone is set with a pair of binoculars gifted to a young girl who tries them out immediately, only to fall victim to the hidden spikes that bore through her eyes into her brain. Nothing else tops that horrifying sequence but it doesn't have to, audiences for the first time asked to identify with the murderer as never before, and two decades before it truly came into its own with the spawn of "Friday the 13th." At the start of the decade Gothic efforts like "The Strange Door" were nostalgic, the focus on villain Charles Laughton balanced by the young ingenue in danger and a heroic figure to rescue her. There is virtually no opposition to Gough's Edmond Bancroft, veteran author of popular novels and articles on crime, his obsessive egomania such that his ultimate goal is to taunt authorities and look like a genius by orchestrating a series of murders perpetrated by his obedient teenage underling (Graham Curnow), under the effects of a Jekyll/Hyde serum that brings out the boy's horrific qualities. Bancroft purchases every antique weapon to be used, storing them in his secret Black Museum, one that parallels Scotland Yard's own museum, which is never open to the public. Gough's lip smacking relish is a far cry from his low key performance as Arthur Holmwood opposite Peter Cushing's Van Helsing in "Horror of Dracula" (all of his Cohen roles delivered this way), and quite unlike the tortured artist who haunts Christopher Lee's vengeful critic in "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors." Perhaps the actor had something of an imp inside that saw these horror outings as a way to just let 'er rip, implausible but never less than entertaining, just the right arrogant touch this one needed. Fortunately, the presence of future James Bond regular Geoffrey Keen lends some weight to the on screen investigation, a rarity for a Cohen film (the dependable Jack Watson is sadly lost at sea in the upcoming "Konga"). At the very beginning of a career that continued well into the 2000s, Shirley Anne Field can do little to make her character either likable or interesting, such is the way Herman Cohen depicted his female leads; she made a greater impact in "Peeping Tom" and particularly Hammer's "These Are the Damned" (this was the screen swan song for veteran director Arthur Crabtree, selected for his previous work on Marshall Thompson's "Fiend Without a Face"). Today we can hardly speculate on the impact it had on viewers accustomed to happy endings and evil vanquished, for as the 60s dawned Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" would become the benchmark for the future, as frightening and inevitable as death itself.