Amicus always managed to get great casts for their anthological films especially, and the fact that one or two decent American actors\/actresses are present here merely, emphasises the point.<\/p>\n
Burgess Meredith plays Dr. Diablo with marvellous relish in the linking story about a fairground charlatan who presides over “the sheers of fate” (held by an actress who can’t keep still!).<\/p>\n
Predictably, the stories are of variable quality and, like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, some of the execution is stagey, mainly because the sets are so cheap-looking.<\/p>\n
Story 1 about a dead witch who possesses a cat and causes a inheritor to rue his greediness is satisfactorily macabre and entertaining; Story 2 is more mysterious than horrific but the story about androids is, at least, relatively original; Story 3 is a distinctly silly episode about a piano “with a mind of it’s own”, who kills it’s player’s lover; Story 4, however, is the “piece de resistance” about the resurrection of Edgar Allan Poe (wonderful idea by Robert Bloch!). The performances in this story are also worthy of mention – Jack Palance almost puts Peter Cushing in the shade with his eccentric hamminess as a Poe fanatic, but both of them really do bring the best out of the script.<\/p>\n
Overall, this compendium has it’s faults but some of it’s excellent acting and inventive script-writing push it to my second favourite Amicus film (behind The House That Dripped Blood).<\/p>\n
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Amicus always managed to get great casts for their anthological films especially, and the fact that one or two decent American actors\/actresses are present here merely, emphasises the point. Burgess Meredith plays Dr. Diablo with marvellous relish in the linking story about a fairground charlatan who presides over “the sheers of fate” (held by an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movie-news","wpcat-1-id"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"thumbnail":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0-201x300.jpg",201,300,true],"medium_large":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"large":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"1536x1536":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"2048x2048":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"gridflex-1422w-autoh-image":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"gridflex-1074w-autoh-image":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",470,700,false],"gridflex-360w-300h-image":["http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/53e129ebccbf4d3223a587d73554d0b0.jpg",201,300,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"admin1","author_link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Amicus always managed to get great casts for their anthological films especially, and the fact that one or two decent American actors\/actresses are present here merely, emphasises the point. Burgess Meredith plays Dr. Diablo with marvellous relish in the linking story about a fairground charlatan who presides over “the sheers of fate” (held by an...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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