I first encountered The Crimson Cult when
I caught the opening credits on my way out the door from my parents’
house a couple of months ago. There were groceries to be bought, and
thus I couldn’t stick around, but that twisted, psychedelic credits
sequence told me I had to track this movie down. Then there was the cast: Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, and Michael Gough all in one movie!
Holy fuck!!!! Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the movie
didn’t quite live up to my fevered expectations, but it’s still pretty
goddamned cool.
It’s just a pity the very best scene is the one
that opens the film. The setting is a dark, dungeon-like chamber.
Assembled therein are a beautiful, turquoise-skinned woman with an
elaborate golden headdress (Barbara Steele, from Black Sunday and The Horrible Dr. Hichcock);
a bearded man in a hooded black robe, who happens to be holding a small
goat in his arms; a great big beefcake guy in a fetching leather
apron-and-speedo ensemble, accessorized with a studded leather cap
adorned with antlers, of all things; and another attractive girl
in a costume that makes the bondage fetishist in me feel all warm and
fuzzy inside. The odd man out in this motley crew is a pasty-faced
Englishman (Denys Peek) in a conservative brown business suit; one
suspects that the whole affair is being staged for his benefit, and that
he will become more directly involved once Bondage Girl finishes
flogging the naked chick strapped to the table in the middle of the
room. And sure enough, the very moment she’s through, the
turquoise-skinned woman asks the businessman if he is ready to sign. He
is, and the hooded man with the goat produces a colossal leather-bound
book and a quill pen, with which the would-be signatory makes good his
professed intentions. “Welcome to our world of darkness,” Turquoise
Skin says, and hands the businessman a golden dagger, which he then uses
to stab the naked, bound girl in the heart. I don’t know about you,
but that sure as hell got my attention!
It turns out the businessman is named Peter
Manning, and he is an antiques dealer. We learn this from his brother,
Robert (Mark Eden, from the original TV version of “Quatermass and the
Pit”), who helps him run his shop, and who has just received word that
Peter is coming home early from a buying expedition in the tiny country
hamlet of Greymarshe. This is rather troubling to Robert, because the
letter in which Peter expresses this intention was postmarked ten days
ago, and there is still no sign of him. Fortunately, Peter’s letter
mentions that he has been staying at the Craxley Lodge, and gives both
the address and telephone number for the place. Then again, when Robert
calls that number, the man he speaks to claims never to have heard of
Peter Manning. With a real mystery thus on his hands, Robert decides to
drive out to Greymarshe to have a look around.
You know the drill. It’s a creepy little place
where the locals have strange customs and don’t quite trust outsiders.
And of course, Craxley Lodge has a bad reputation in town. But at least
the villagers here aren’t quite as rude or uncooperative as those in
some other B-movie hamlets I could name (anyone else remember Die, Monster, Die!?),
and they do at least tell Manning how to get to the lodge. What he
finds there is surpassingly bizarre. A huge psychedelic party is going
on in the main hall, full of half-naked dancing floozies, goofy
late-60’s fuzztone rock, and lots and lots of champagne-fueled making
out. Not exactly what one would expect from a place like Craxley Lodge.
Robert eventually finds someone who’s still sober enough to clue him
in on what’s up; it turns out the girl he talks to is Eve Morley
(Virginia Wetherell, from A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde),
niece of the J. D. Morley who owns Craxley Lodge (Christopher Lee, as
we shall soon see). The big debauch in the hall is Eve’s party in
celebration of the Greymarshe’s biggest local holiday, which
commemorates the burning of a witch named Lavinia, who just happens to
have been one of Eve’s distant ancestors. Eve then shows Robert to her
uncle’s study, so that he can get on with the business that has brought
him to Greymarshe.
Morley reiterates that he has never heard of
Peter Manning. At the very least, he’s quite sure no one by that name
ever came to stay at the lodge. Morely’s sorry he couldn’t be of more
assistance, but if he’d like to look around town some more in the
morning, Manning is welcome to stay the night at Craxley Lodge. Robert
takes him up on the offer, and thus he is still around when one of
Morley’s friends comes to visit. This is Professor John Marsh (Karloff,
in the last remotely classy movie he ever made), a cranky, suspicious
old man with a wealth of knowledge about local history— especially the
history concerning Lavinia Morley. And he doesn’t seem to like Robert
Manning very much. He seems particularly disapproving of Robert’s
presence at the festival that midnight, where the villagers burn an
effigy of the witch Lavinia.
Marsh may not be the only one who disapproves,
either. That night, Robert dreams of the turquoise-skinned woman and
her entourage. Do I really need to tell you that she looks just like
the effigy of Lavinia Morley that the villagers tossed onto the bonfire
just a few hours before? Lavinia wants Robert to sign the same book
Peter did, but Robert isn’t going for it. (Personally, I think it’s
‘cause Bondage Girl isn’t there to put on a show this time. I know I’d
be much more willing to sell my soul if I got to watch her do her stuff
first.) When Robert remains obstinate in the face of repeated demands
for his signature, Lavinia picks up a convenient dagger and makes to
stab him. That’s when he wakes up.
Robert’s second day in Greymarshe is as
fruitless as the first. Neither of the antique shops in town have any
information to offer him, nor does anybody else. Morley’s butler, Elder
(Michael Gough, from Horror of Dracula and The Skull),
also starts sneaking into Manning’s room when he isn’t around. And on
top of that, Robert almost gets his head shot off by Marsh’s sidekick,
Basil (Michael Warren), when he stumbles upon the professor hunting in
the woods. But the biggest shock to Robert’s system comes at night,
when he again dreams of Lavinia, and wakes up on the very edge of a pond
out past the woods around Craxley Lodge. He also finds that he’s been
injured, in about the same place where Lavinia’s dagger would have hit
him had she finished the stab before he awoke. The fact that he ends
his night by going to bed with Eve is relatively small consolation for
all the creepy, threatening shit he’s had to put up with in the last 24
hours.
Now, you might wonder why a witch— living, dead,
or reincarnated, as the case may be— would have such a grudge against a
lowly antique dealer. I mean, I’m sure the man’s sold some horrendous
pieces of shit at some seriously inflated prices in his time, but that
scarcely seems like the kind of thing that would merit such relentless
pursuit. Well, what if I told you that there used to be a branch of the
Manning family in Greymarshe, back around the time of Lavinia’s
execution? Would that shed any light on the issue? Sure it would. And
some more light is shed when Robert finds a secret passage in his room,
leading up to the attic, where there is a chamber exactly like the one
in his dreams. This chamber may look like it hasn’t been used in
centuries, but closer examination reveals that all the cobwebs shrouding
everything in it are false ones of the sort you might buy at a
particularly high-class party supply store around Halloween, and in one
of the closets hang several of the costumes in which the characters from
Robert’s dreams are attired. You think maybe Robert hasn’t really been
dreaming?
It’s unfortunate, but probably inevitable, that The Crimson Cult
isn’t nearly as good as its cast. By framing the story primarily as a
mystery, the filmmakers deprive themselves of most of their
opportunities for action and excitement, and little use is made of the
talents of the four big stars. It is entirely understandable that
Karloff would be underutilized; after all, there’s only so much that an
81-year-old man in a wheelchair can do. But with the others, there
isn’t nearly so good an excuse. Christopher Lee’s role as the main
villain is confirmed too late for him to make much of the part, while
Gough and Steele are completely squandered in roles that
compartmentalize them outside of the main action. All of Steele’s
scenes are real zingers, especially that first one, but there aren’t
quite enough of them, and they’re too isolated from the rest of the
plot.
The final frustration with The Crimson Cult
is that it is now next to impossible to see the film as the Brits saw
it back in 1968. The U.S. theatrical version (the basis for this
review), which plays occasionally on cable TV, was shorn of most of its
sleaze. The S&M-flavored torture scene at the beginning has been
trimmed almost to the point of complete excision, and an especially
jarring edit cuts the bulk of the sex scene with Robert and Eve. There
may be more missing, but these two changes are the ones that really
stand out. On the other hand, the currently available legitimate home
video version, which goes by the original English title, The Curse of the Crimson Altar,
features all the footage missing from the expurgated American version,
but suffers from a different kind of defacement. The very effective
orchestral score with which the movie played in theaters (preserved in
the version you’ll see on cable in the States) has reputedly been
replaced with unbelievably cheesy electronic keyboard music, which can’t
possibly fail to undermine the movie’s impact. To the best of my
knowledge, the only way to see the film uncut with the original
soundtrack intact is to get your hands on a bootleg version I saw for
sale on the internet once, in which somebody had dubbed the audio track
from The Crimson Cult over the video elements from The Curse of the Crimson Altar. I don’t know about you, but I think this looks like a job for Anchor Bay.
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