Film Review
The title
Corridors of Blood
suggests something quite different to what the film actually offers -
not a gory slasher romp set in a modern office block but a fairly
grown-up period drama whose horror content owes far more to historical
fact than the morbid imagination of a writer. Encouraged by the
massive success of
Grip of the Strangler (1958),
Amalgamated Productions recruited Robert Day to direct Boris Karloff in
a similar kind of period horror-melodrama, but one that does away with
the supernatural elements and derives its chills from the nightmarish
reality of surgery in early Victorian England, a time when operations
were performed with the patient conscious and able to see the horrors
being performed on his or her person by knife-wielding surgeons.
The subject matter of
Corridors of
Blood alone is enough to make it one of the most gruesome films
to be made in Britain in the 1950s, but the film struggled to find an
audience and its release in America was delayed by five years owing to
a restructuring at MGM. Today, the film's main attraction is that
it brings together two of cinema's greatest horror icons, Boris Karloff
and Christopher Lee - the metaphorical passing of the baton is accomplished
by Karloff throwing a bottle of sulphuric acid into Lee's face. Even though
the two actors only appear together in a few scenes, there's
an enjoyable frisson to be had in seeing them in the same shot.
Just before he found fame as Dracula in Hammer's series of
Gothic horrors, Lee has plenty of fun with an even more monstrous
role, looking as sinister as Hell as a party to a Burke and Hare style enterprise.
As in his previous film for Amalgamated, Karloff plays a Jekyll and Hyde character, this
time one whose demonic transformation is more moral than physical, the
result of a deadly concoction of opium and well-meaning obsession.
Whilst
Corridors of Blood
boasts some strong performances and some surprisingly good production
values, its pace is slack and a feeling of ennui sets in around the
mid-point. Day's leaden direction is partly to blame, but the
main culprit is Jean Scott Rogers's screenplay which lacks tension and
enough plot to sustain the feature-length narrative, although it is
historically accurate for the most part (even if the characters are
entirely fictional). It may not be as compelling as the similarly
styled and equally mis-titled
The Flesh and the Fiends
(1960), but
Corridors of Blood
still has more going for it than most of Karloff's films of this era, and it
never hurts to be reminded just how bad things were in the good old
days before anaesthesia.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
London, 1840. 'Pain and the knife are inseparable' is the
prevailing view in the medical profession, but one man who disputes
this is Dr Thomas Bolton, a philanthropic surgeon who devotes his spare
time to developing a safe anaesthetic that will make surgery completely
painless. Dr Bolton is confident he has achieved his aim but
ridicule is heaped on him by his peers when his public demonstration
fails and a patient regains consciousness in the course of having his
arm amputated. Disgraced and dismissed from his position, Bolton
continues his research in secret, with chemicals stolen for him by a
gang of murderous criminals. In return, the latter coerce Bolton
into signing bogus death certificates for their victims, whose bodies
they sell for medical research. Unwittingly, Bolton becomes
addicted to the anaesthetic gases he is experimenting with and in time he
begins to lose his mind...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.