Director: Freddie Francis
Screenplay: Milton Subotsky
Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Max Adrian, Alan Freeman, Ann Bell, Peter Madden, Donald Sutherland, Roy Castle, Michael Gough
Running Time: 98 minutes
Genre: Horror
Six strangers meet in a train carriage. One of them, Dr. Schreck (Cushing), whose name, we're told, means "terror" in German, offers to tell the others' fortunes with his tarot deck (which he calls his "house of horrors"). His five companions are each told their grim fates in a series of stories involving werewolves, killer vines, voodoo curses, vengeful disembodied hands and vampires.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Hammer Films held British horror cinema in it's cold, undead grasp. However one of their main competitors was Amicus Films, which had a similar look to the Hammer Films and often used the same actors (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were both regulars in Amicus films as well as their better known Hammer films). However Amicus usually had a contemporary setting, as opposed to Hammer's usual period settings, and they really found their niche with a series of anthology, or "portmanteau", films. Instead of having a single narrative running throughout the film, these consisted of four or five separate short stories usually connected by a framing story. Dr. Terror's House of Horrors was the first of these (and was followed by Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974)). These films, by their very nature, were usually something of a mixed bag, but if you weren't enjoying one story, you didn't have to wait too long for something else to come along. As with all of these films, the title promises far more scares and gore than it delivers, it really is very mild particularly by modern standards. The special effects are really basic, with the killer plant being someone shaking a vine off-screen, the disembodied hand is a rubber glove fitted with a pump and then there is the rubber bat bobbing along on a wire. The cast is very eclectic with veterans such as Christopher Lee as an obnoxious art critic, Peter Cushing as the creepy fortune teller and Michael Gough, alongside Roy Castle who would later become beloved to decades of British children as the host of Record Breakers (1972-1994), jazz singer Kenny Lynch, future Hollywood star Donald Sutherland in an early role, and a rare acting role from DJ Alan "Fluff" Freeman ("Not 'arf, pop-pickers!") doing battle with killer weeds. Everyone plays the material as best they can, providing impressive gravitas. The stories are enjoyable, with some welcome humour. The story with the vengeful hand is probably the best of the bunch, the worst being the voodoo story which has not aged well (even though it does feature a weird little in-joke where Roy Castle is terrified by a lurid poster for Dr. Terror's House of Horrors). It all ends with a surprisingly eerie conclusion.
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