While people generally – and understandably – associate American International’s Poe series with Roger Corman, the company in fact continued to flog the rapidly expiring horse into the 1970s, by fair means or foul. In 1968, they retitled Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General to The Conqueror Worm for the US market, adding a few lines of Vincent Price reading from that obscure Poe poem to justify the change and allow them to market it as a Poe film. Frankly, you have to wonder how many people outside of Poe obsessives even knew that The Conqueror Worm was a Poe work in order to make that a marketable title.

Reeves was lined up as director of The Oblong Box, another British made AIP film that takes its title – and nothing else – from another lesser-known Poe work, but died before production began. He was replaced by Gordon Hessler who, while an efficient filmmaker, was no Reeves. No Corman either, for that matter, and the most immediately notable thing about The Oblong Box is the lack of visual flair in comparison to Corman’s films. Gone are the psychedelic opening titles, the unsettlingly stagey studio settings (which were, admittedly, abandoned by Corman himself for The Tomb of Ligeia) and the morbid atmosphere that tended to pervade the earlier Poe films. This feels like much more of a journeyman effort.

The film completely jettisons the short story that it lifts its name from, and for the most part doesn’t bother with the general ambiance of Poe either, beyond a premature burial sequence. Instead, it has the look and feel of many of the sub-Hammer gothics of the decade – not quite as sumptuous as a Hammer film, but still with a veneer of class (provided in part by various Hammer personnel who worked on the film). It also teams Vincent Price and Christopher Lee for the first time – though ‘teams’ might not be the right word, as they only share one brief scene together, a waste that Hessler would rep
eat in his next film, Scream and Scream Again, where Price, Lee and Peter Cushing all shared the bill but not, for the most part, the screen.

The film opens with an African voodoo ceremony in which an unseen white man is crucified, tortured and mutilated for reasons unknown (at this point, at least). Cutting to England some time later, and Sir Julian Markham (Price) keeps his deformed and insane brother Edward (Alister Williamson) locked in an attic room – a situation that Edward is none too happy about. He pays the corrupt family lawyer Trench (Peter Arne) to hire an African witchdoctor (Harry Baird), who comes up with a drug that will induce a death-like trance, the idea being that when considered dead, Edward can be smuggled to freedom. Unfortunately, on finding his brother ‘dead’, Julian immediately places him in a sealed coffin and forces Trench to steal another body to act as a normal looking proxy. Rather than doing this, Trench instead murders a seedy landlord. But the plans to free Edward are now in ruins.

As Julian, free of his responsibilities, can begin living life again by marrying fiancée Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer), the film shifts its attentions to Dr Neuhartt (Lee), who has been paying body snatchers to provide corpses for medical research. When he opens one coffin, up pops a remarkably fresh Edward, who uses his knowledge of Neuhartt’s dodgy dealings to blackmail the doctor into keeping him hidden away. Donning a crimson mask, he then sets out nightly to take his revenge on those who left him to be buried alive.

It’s unusual to find a horror film of the period in which neither Lee nor Price is the bad guy, but here is one. While Neuhartt might be involved in shady deals for corpses, he’s doing so for noble reasons and is suitably appalled by Edward’s bloody crimes. And Price is, for the most part, a blameless character – though a late revelation shows that it is his actions for which his brother has been made to suffer. While this is unusual, it does seem a bit of a waste to have two such fine screen villains effectively reduced to supporting roles (Price in particular has very little to do apart from look troubled), especially as Williamson was apparently such a bad actor that not only do we not see his face until the end of the film, but his voice was entirely redubbed – essentially reducing him to a Dave Prowse like glorified stuntman role. The original Michael Reeves version (written by Lawrence Huntington but overhauled in this version by Hessler and Christopher Wicking) had Price playing both brothers, which might have been more interesting – though the whole ‘evil twin locked in the attic’ story had already been done a few tears earlier in The Black Torment. Still, the Reeves version remains one of the great ‘what if’s of film history.

Edward’s revenge is sadly a little lacklustre, consisting of a handful of unconvincing throat cuttings (they look more like someone smearing sauce across a neck with a table knife – which is effectively what they are), and he’s distracted at one point by a visit to the world’s most raucous pub where he offs prostitute Uta Levka. He also takes a fancy to cute maid Sally (Sally Geeson), though this is hardly developed enough to justify suddenly becoming a major point of the finale. The film of course goes out of its way to avoid showing his face until the end, and inevitably, the final revelation is a bit of a disappointment.

Still, The Oblong Box is a reasonably entertaining film if taken on face value. Hessler might not have been an imaginative filmmaker, but he was certainly an efficient one, and he keeps the pace fast and ensures that the film looks good, even if it lacks the style of its predecessors. If you’ve just discovered the Poe series through the recent Arrow releases, this might seen a little flat in comparison, but nevertheless, it’s a nice addition for anyone looking for a continuation of that series, and as English gothic cinema goes, it’s an interesting, enjoyable companion piece to outriders like The Creeping Flesh and I, Monster.

DAVID FLINT

BUY IT NOW (UK)