Torture Garden (1967)

After visiting his torture-based mobile cabinet of wax that’s apparently part of a fairground sideshow, the proprietor, one Dr Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), invites five of his customers (Michael Bryant, Beverly Adams, Barbara Ewing, Jack Palance and Michael Ripper, who confusingly enough does not seem to play an innkeeper) to a very special show. There, he presents warnings of possible futures where they do evil by getting them to stare at the shears of a figure of Atropos. Since this is an Amicus anthology movie, every vision makes one segment of the movie.

First up is “Enoch”, in which something that presents as a cat develops a rather unholy influence on a young would-be playboy who basically murdered his uncle.

Then follows “Terror Over Hollywood”, in which we learn the rather boring secret that keeps certain Hollywood stars seemingly immortal. No, it’s not cosmetic surgery or the injection of snake toxins, silly!

Next up is “Mr. Steinway”, concerning that most classic of love triangle between Man, Woman and Grand Piano.

We finish up on “The Man Who Collected Poe”, where the greatest of all Poe collectors (Peter Cushing) meets a rather too enthusiastic sharer (Jack Palance) in his interest.

Poor Michael Ripper doesn’t actually get his own segment but is used to close the framing story. You’ll never guess who Dr Diabolo actually is (if you are very, very slow)!

As friends of weird fiction and literary horror will probably have noticed (if you didn’t simply know already), the segments of this film directed by the great Freddie Francis are all based on stories by the equally great Robert Bloch (who did so much more than just write the novel Hitchock’s Psycho is based on). In fact, this is one of the three Amicus anthology films scripted by Bloch himself. So it’s no surprise it is full of the man’s interest in classic supernatural authors as well as (usually aberrant) psychology, with a healthy dose of the macabre added for good measure.

Quality-wise, this isn’t my favourite of the Bloch/Amicus bunch (that would obviously be Asylum), but it does have quite a bit to recommend it. Well, “Terror Over Hollywood” is just bland, taking way too much time to come to a not terribly interesting or shocking ending, but every anthology needs to have one single bad entry at least. “Enoch” provides Francis with some nice opportunities for creating a creepy, gothic-style mood; this is also one of the few films I know which feature an evil cat the filmmakers actually manage to make look rather sinister.

“Mr. Steinway” works best if you treat it as a work of black humour of the most sardonic type; its psychological basis is a bit too obvious and so outdated it weakens the whole thing considerably if you take it too seriously. On the other hand, a pianist having an unhealthy connection to his supernaturally endowed instrument certainly isn’t without resonance.

The last one’s the greatest treasure here, though, and “The Man Who Collected Poe” doesn’t just have an excellent joke in its title, but also features a particularly huge dose of Francis’s patented gothic mood – this time aiming for a heated version of the same very fitting to the tale’s Poe theme – and a great outing by Jack Palance. Seeing Palance orgasmically (I’m not even sure that’s a metaphor) rubbing himself against all sorts of Poe paraphernalia is quite the thing, as grotesquely funny as it is creepy. Even better is the script’s emphasis on his obsession with Poe and all thing weird being so great, he’d be perfectly willing to die for it, if it only provides him with a kind of total communion with his love.


This final segment alone, in combination with Meredith’s most excellent mugging as the Devil (spoiler?), would be worth the entry, but the rest of the film, “Hollywood” excepted, really isn’t bad at all either to watch on a rainy night.