The Halloween Diary: Amicus

I had knocked out three fun haunted house films today, and I guess The House That Dripped Blood would have been more fitting, but I just had the itch to spend some time this Sunday night with From Beyond the Grave (1974). I had wrote a "Dark Stormy Night" review for the film not too long ago, so I won't spend a great deal of time on it here. Amicus has its special place during October with me. I'm always looking to get in plenty of the studios' output in October. I think I have kicked off the Halloween season exactly as I prefer, getting my first Amicus Omnibus in style.

I think I put Grave right behind The House That Dripped Blood & Tales from the Crypt in the favorites tier. I think I find it worthwhile if just because I didn't find a single tale I didn't like. Sure, "The Elemental" isn't exactly creepy at all, but it has its place due to the entity (invisible but dangerous) making life miserable for a man and eventually his wife. Margaret Leighton's flashy part as a kooky spiritualist with powers and knowledge in how to usurp the entity's desire to take the body of the host it attaches seems to be this tale's standout. The Pleasences, Donald and Angela, get the chance to appear as, well, father and daughter, including Ian Bannen's cuckholded "jumped-up clerk" in "An Act of Kindness". Boy, I tell you, Diana Dors as Bannen's wife emasculates him something fierce. He bangs his hands on the table in an act of childish rejection of her treatment of him and she just berates him right back. Angela has this way of slowly moving like a phantom, and her eerie presence fascinates me. Donald has that look of knowing deception that carries a "spider leading the fly into the web" vibe to it as Bannen continues to hang around him. The child in the middle of this has that look of grinning mischief that rears its ugly head at the end. David Warner's "art con", with a hinted high value of himself, becomes the unwitting  pawn in a ghoul's desire to escape the confines of this otherworldly limbo "inside" a mirror when a seance awakens it from its slumber. How Warner must lure women (of "ill repute") into the pad, having to obey the control of "the spectre" (Marcel Steiner) that demands to be feed *blood* is just unsettling. The way the pad becomes a trash heap with blood smeared all over the place, and Warner "sleeping it off" as he himself is covered by the red shed from women just gradually reiterates the inhuman descent. Then the spectre, young and with form, outside the mirror after Warner kills the apartment complex operator, asking Warner to take one more step towards immortality (to join "legion") emphasizes how the blood of the living can refurbish the evils from the beyond. "The Door", my favorite, has a young very pretty married couple (Ian Ogilvey and Lesley-Ann Down) dealing with a psychotic aristocrat thanks to a certain door that provides access to a room he once lived. The aristocrat freely admits in a book available for Ogilvey to read that his activities are voluntary, totally devoted to serving his unholy needs. Down will be his desired victim. And all this attached to antiques purchased or stolen at the shop of a cadaverous owner with the items  (mirror that Warner wrongfully claims is fake, "snuff box" that has price tags changed by Ian Carmichael, and war medal literally stolen by Bannen from a case to fool Pleasence into believing he's a respectfully decorated war hero) carrying a curse for those who attain them through nefarious means. Only Ogilvey does right by Cushing's antiquities store owner. Cushing has that all-knowing quality as the "lead wraparound character" we Amicus fans know all too well. The corrupt characters think they're getting away with highway robbery but Cushing knows better. I can't help but love the antique store as part of the wraparound device. Cushing being its owner, Temptations Lmtd. This is exactly how I do want to spend a Sunday evening.