(1973)
Dir - Don Sharp
Overall: MEH
Don Sharp was a bit uneven as a director, having made a couple of OK to good films in the horror vein plus a few unremarkable ones as well. Dark Places is one in the OK variety. A small yet fully recognizable cast starting with the top-billed Christopher Lee and Joan Collins, Czech born character actor Herbert Lom, (Hammer's Phantom of the Opera, Jess Franco's Count Dracula, Mark of the Devil, The Dead Zone), and Robert Hardy, (Berserk!, Psychomania, Demons of the Mind, and Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter franchise), the film has some potential with a simple plot device of a dead, rich guy who left all his money hidden in a haunted house that every character is after. It is almost creepy in a couple of scenes, but Sharp does not film nearly enough of it in any kind of creative manner. The textbook script just kind of goes along in a predictable manner even if the angle of jumping from past to present in a single scene is still a nifty idea. It is not a poor production and the script by Ed Brennan and Joseph Van Winkle is fairly tight. That said, it is just pretty ordinary and instead of building on a potential, spooky atmosphere, it plays the psychological elements too straightforward to really grab you.
(1975)
Dir - Freddie Francis
Overall: MEH
The smaller Tyburn Films scored Freddie Francis, Peter Cushing, and screenwriter Anthony Hinds for their rather unnecessary re-working of Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf, here changed to Legend of the Werewolf. Both films were based off of the Guy Endore, 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris, feature nearly identical make-up design. Hinds also scripted each one, making the similarities between this and the Oliver Reed-stared film from fourteen years prior unmistakable. Each movie suffers from far too little on-screen wolfman time as well as a too familiar story that even tweaked significantly as it is here in some parts, still comes off as predictably as can be. This is not to say that a decent production cannot be made out of wholly recognizable horror cliches as many of these British studios alone had been essentially making the same handful of movies over and over again for decades at this point. While Cushing is always quite marvelous and gets enough to do here and Francis tries to spice things up with some red-tinted POV shots, the derivative and nature simply cannot elevate it above just being another OK werewolf movie.
(1978)
Dir - Norman J. Warren
Overall: MEH
Shot independently with the revenue made from Norman J. Warren's previous Satan's Slave, (and utilizing one of the same locations from said film), the bluntly titled Terror was a deliberately stupid, supernatural giallo-channeling hodgepodge. The film cannot really decide if it wants to be straight Gothic horror, a simple "who dunnit", a haunted house movie, or a colorful, extravagant Italian slasher so by attempting to be all of the above, it is assuredly messy. It is no accident that it comes off as a second-rate Suspiria at times, with Warren and screenwriter David McGillivray, (who also worked with Pete Walker on House of Whipcord and House of Mortal Sin), intentionally borrowing as much surface level elements from Dario Argento's masterpiece as they can. The result is thoroughly less successful of course, but Terror is the type of movie where if you give in to its utter disregard for coherency, it is passably enjoyable. Still, everything is simplified to the point where it becomes rather silly. Several scenes are pointless, hardly any of the murders are necessary, sometimes they appear supernatural and other times they do not, there are random characters that serve no purpose at all, the editing is confused, the cinematography uneven, and the ending falls a bit short of being as creepy as it was intended.
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