Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror is the cinematic equivalent of a gothic wine flight: three mini-doses of Edgar Allan Poe, poured into one luridly lit glass, swirled with gallows humour, and gulped down with Vincent Price’s velvety voice as the chaser. Released in 1962 at the height of Corman’s “Poe cycle,” it’s both spooky and…
Tag: Basil Rathbone
Queen of Blood (1966) – Review
Let’s say you’re a low-budget filmmaker in the mid-60s, you love weird horror, and you’ve just gotten your hands on some cool Soviet sci-fi footage, stuff that looks a hundred times more expensive than anything you can shoot in California. What do you do? If you’re Curtis Harrington, you spin that into Queen of Blood,…
The Black Sleep (1956) – Review
The horror genre is rife with mad scientists – it’s the most popular occupation to hold in this genre – and today we will be looking at another macabre gem from the golden age of horror cinema. But what is surprising about this entry is that with a cast that includes Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi,…
The Black Cat (1941) – Review
The 1930s and 1940s were a Golden Age of “Old Dark House” stories with such offerings as The Cat and the Canary and Horror Island populating theatres, but when you blend that “Old Dark House” setting with one of the works by the greatest Gothic writers of all time, Edgar Allan Poe, you are pretty…
Tower of London (1939) – Review
In the early 1500s, William Shakespeare wrote the most notable drama depicting the rise of King Richard III, a vile character who usurped the thrown and murdered children, but quite a while after Shakespeare penned his version Universal Pictures offered their own take when they paired Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff to depict this classic…