The final film of British Fiend Without a Face director
Arthur Crabtree for British film company Anglo-Amalgamated Horrors of the
Black Museum is, second to Mario Bava’s Caltiki – The Immortal Monster as
the goriest, most violent horror film of 1959.
A movie that seemed to dwell in the same household as Hammer horror with
a greater emphasis on sadomasochism, violence and/or sexuality, the film gave distinguished
character actor Michael Gough (best known as Alfred from the Batman
movies) a role to sink his teeth into as a true crime novelist who may be more
deeply involved in his work than he leads on.
Loosely based on a real Scotland Yard crime museum including binoculars as
murder weapons and other bizarre tools of killing, the low budget shocker
written and produced by Herman Cohen became the first in Anglo-Amalgamated’s
loosely connected Sadian Trilogy followed by Circus of Horrors and
more infamously Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, signaling a far more
adults-only psychosexual edge to a new wave of uncompromising crime thrillers.
London and Scotland Yard’s Black Museum are being rocked by
a series of bizarre and insidious murders almost like a reawakening of Jack the
Ripper, including but not limited to a pair of binoculars with nails in them
which stab the eyes out of a woman in the film’s opening scene, signaling a new
fiercely violent set of grisly sights to come.
Tailing the murder scenes is crime journalist Edmond Bancroft (Michael
Gough), a kind of Sutter Cane pop horror novelist whose readers delight in the
grisly details of his writings.
However,
as more bodies start turning up with Bancroft turning up as the self-proclaimed
crime expert on every crime scene alongside his assistant Rick (Graham Curnow)
who manages a private black museum filled with wax figures of maimed and
impaled tortured bodies, suspicions begin arising about the patterns unfolding
and whether or not Bancroft himself might be the one committing the crimes to
generate material to write about.
Originally censored in Britain to tone down scenes of gore
including a severed head, a man being dissolved in acid and murder via ice
tongs, Horrors of the Black Museum is surely not only among the most
violent British horror films of 1959 with a bit of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
connotation, but without question the most ferocious acting you’ll ever see
from the ordinarily mild mannered and composed Michael Gough. In a role originally written for Vincent Price
before budgetary restrictions cast Gough instead, the actor completely dives
head over heels into the narcissistic, mad and obsessive Edmond Bancroft who almost
attacks the screen with an energy and mania you’d never expect from kindly old
Alfred.
VCI’s uncensored
blu-ray is excellent and comes with both reversible art, an archival commentary
by the film’s original producer Herman Cohen and a phone interview with him as
well. Fans of modern horror unfamiliar
with this still shocking murder spree will be taken aback by just how far Great
Britain cinema went as well as seeing actor Michael Gough in a light not
completely unlike his ruthless patriarch in Crucible of Horror but far
more searing. You’ll never look at
Alfred the same way again.
--Andrew Kotwicki