What a title, what a cast. What a poster! An Amicus Production starring not only Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but Vincent Price... what could possible go wrong? Well where to begin. With three stars and three storylines, it seems logical that this would be a solid anthology feature. Or at least a decent slice of fun horror nonsense in a film that features severed limbs, acid baths and espionage. In fact the whole thing feels more like a Cold War thriller in a lot of scenes, which could be a good blend. However it's all too good to be true, and instead what remains is mostly a slog that wastes all the potential it has until the good will it inspires has dissolved entirely.
There's a strong opening, as a man jogging in the street suddenly falls ill and wakes up in a sinister hospital. Over the course of the story a surgeon performs a series of procedures without offering him any explanation. It's a good hook that keeps things bleak and mysterious for most of the running time, although it seems that this is unrelated until the last few minutes when an exposition dump arrives. Although the end results are about as silly as you could hope for the structure of the film makes it feel a lot longer than ninety-five minutes, and by the end it's not a satisfying conclusion. There's a lot going on and at times it feels both over stretched and under written.
In the other threads a serial killer is on the loose and Detective Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is trying to figure out his motives. His investigation leads him to the latest victim's employer Dr. Browning (Vincent Price) but it's probably just a coincidence. The only information they have suggests that the murderer is a total psychopath. What a shocker. Meanwhile Peter Cushing is an officer in an unknown country that seems to be standing in for East Germany. He's got a few issues with one of his men, a sadistic interrogator called Konratz (Marshall Jones) who seems to be overstepping his authority. But that's the least of his worries as Cushing is barely even in the film.
The problem here is that there's supposed to be an enigmatic quality to the story in which somehow the search for a maniac is linked to both the police state and the man in the hospital ward. But there just aren't enough intersecting lines for it to feel like a complex web of narrative pieces. It's mostly just a dry procedural featuring inept detectives and the least dramatic car chase ever to feature in a horror movie. This big second act spectacle might be a good centre piece to the story in theory. But it looks like they filmed most of it on the same handful of hairpin bends as the cops chase the killer (Michael Gothard) after a sting operation goes predictably wrong.
You could enjoy it for what glimpses of fun there are, but most of the time there's hardly any moments of horror camp, and there are certainly no signs of real terror. The murders do eventually lead to a ridiculous twist as the killer's activities are discovered, and there's a minute or so in which the tone of the film seems to be moving towards the absurd. But even the possibilities of a vampire on the loose or a laboratory where a modern day Frankenstein story is unfolding are neutered by the rest of the film. The elongated car chase is preceded by a foot chase that goes on for just as long, and all the eventual revelations are too po-faced despite the casting of Vincent Price.
Christopher Lee eventually shows up as a British intelligence agency chief who has to assist Konratz and keep the true nature of these events from being uncovered, but even this is incredibly brief. Most of the story, when it actually has a protagonist, is taken up by Dr. Sorel (Christopher Matthews from Scars of Dracula) whose investigation is about as exciting as anything else here. Which is to say he's pretty inept, he moves slowly, and his inclusion as a character at all feels out of place. None of the moving pieces feel like a satisfying part of the whole, and the experience is often bemusing but mostly just dull. Sorel and Bellaver should have been a team, the naive doctor and the world weary detective. Instead there are hints at a structure and hints at character, but not much else.
It's a bizarre mix considering that this could have been more effective as a series of three of four short stories with a nice bookending prologue and epilogue. The inclusion of things like a pop song playing the film's title, people drinking blood, and doctors rambling about building a superhuman race should have at least scored this a few more entertainment points. But when the top billed stars are all glorified cameos and only Lee and Price share screen time, you have to wonder what they were thinking and who planned it all. As a thriller or a crime drama it's tepid and languorous and as an entry in the Amicus library it doesn't have enough style or substance. Vague amusement aside it's not nearly enough for genre fans or anyone looking for a few decent acid soaked thrills.
2/5
