The Crimson Cult
Tigon’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (The Crimson Cult here in the USA 1) has a good cast, but it is not a good film. This is evident from the opening scene.
A droning hum whines in and out as a young man named Peter Manning stands wearing a suit. He looks dazed. In front of him, a nude woman suffers a whip while lying strapped to a table. Men in black robes look on. One has a goat. Wearing a large headdress complete with ram horns, a green-skinned Barbara Steele introduces herself as Lavinia, the “Keeper of the Black Secret”. She asks if Peter knows why he’s there. He does. She asks if he’s ready to sign. He is. A man brings over a large book and Peter signs his name. Then Lavinia hands Peter a dagger. Peter stabs the girl on the table. There’s a quick-cut to the goat, which seems distressed. Lavinia snaps her fingers. There’s a crack of thunder. A muscular man dressed in a leather bikini bottom, leather arm-bands, and a studded leather cap sprouting deer antlers brings over a branding iron which he presses into Peter’s chest.
The film packs a few more of these trippy, S&M-tinged sequences, but they exist more-or-less outside the main narrative, which concerns Peter’s brother, Robert, played by Mark Eden. When Peter doesn’t return home, Robert goes looking for him at a remote country estate called Craxton Lodge. Robert’s arrival coincides with a local festival celebrating the burning of the witch Lavinia some three hundred years earlier. The estate’s owner, J.D. Morley, played by Christopher Lee, claims to have never heard of Peter, but invites Robert to stay on to continue his search. Robert agrees. Robert also meets another of the locals, Professor Marsh, played by Boris Karloff. Marsh, conveniently, is an expert on witchcraft.
A ripe premise, but the execution proves uneven, as the tone veers between cult conspiracy and cartoon mystery. Robert’s warned to “leave while he still can,” and then discovers secret doors and a fake spiderweb machine. When he turns to the local constable for help, he’s laughed off in a vaguely sinister manner. The finale requires some lengthy Scooby-Doo-style exposition to explain away the gaping plot holes, though we’re still left wondering if the scenes with Lavinia were meant to be real or imagined.
Sometimes ambiguity helps a film resonate. But in this case, it only serves to underscore the film’s token attempt to appeal to changing audience tastes. Films like Psycho and Peeping Tom had redefined the horror genre, leaving studios like Tigon scrambling to adjust. Their approach, much like Hammer, was simply add more gore and nudity to their gothic productions. This film takes it a step further, with some ill-conceived meta-humor. One of the characters compares Craxton Lodge to “one of those old houses in horror films,” and Robert replies, “It’s like Boris Karloff’s going to pop up at any moment.”
And speaking of top-billed Karloff, he’s great. Even wheelchair-bound at eighty-years-old, he commands his scenes, bringing a sinister gravitas to his part. Though only booked for eight days, his professionalism saw him willingly film night scenes in a freezing rainstorm (you can see his breath) which led to a case of bronchitis.2
The other members of the headline cast fare less well; Barbara Steele’s wasted in a part that amounts to a few minutes of screen time in the aforementioned trippy sequences and Christopher Lee later confessed that this was one of the few films he didn’t enjoy making, as he was perpetually nervous about his ailing back.3 Already distracted—and saddled with a role that gives him little to do—it’s no wonder this proves the rare film where Lee fails to register.
Still, it’s worth seeking out for Karloff fans, as it was one of his final films and he proves he’s still got it. If only the film were worth his talent.