Review: The Hand of Night

William Sylvester is still grieving for the deaths of his wife and child in a car accident. On an airplane voyage he makes friends with archaeologist Edward Underdown and is talked into catching up with him in Morocco. When an ancient tomb is discovered on one of Underdown’s excavations, it appears to release vampiress Aliza Gur. Sylvester becomes haunted by her, and Underdown’s pretty stepdaughter Diane Clare tries to rescue him from Gur’s otherworldly influence. Or something like that.

Cheap, uneventful supernatural horror flick from 1968 just goes to show that the Italians and Spaniards are much better at this kind of ghostly thing than the Brits tend to be. Directed by Frederic Goode (“Death is a Woman”, “The Syndicate”, “Avalanche”) and scripted by Bruce Stewart (a veteran TV writer), there’s no goddamn plot after about an hour. Nothing was going on, nothing worth a damn at least, unless you find rubber bats, muddy photography shot at 4PM (Or more likely, a badly failed attempt at ‘day for night’ photography), and stupid dream sequences to be ‘something’. Slightly ahead of an Al Adamson crap-fest or one of those shitty Spanish-lensed horror flicks an ailing Boris Karloff ended his career with, this is just so unbearably tedious.

Stiff lead actor William Sylvester looks to be in an horrendous state of mind, and it’s not an acting thing. Diane Clare is comparatively not awful, though she completely fails to maintain whatever vaguely European accent she’s attempting (By the way, the largely non-UK bit players appear to speak English as a seventh language at best. You’ve been warned). The best performance, and frankly the only source of interest whatsoever here, comes from Edward Underdown. He can’t save it, though, as he’s not Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, or Robert Morley (his co-star in “Beat the Devil”).

It’s all a lot of dreamy mind-fuck nonsense, people talking in riddles, all of which Sylvester responds to with a constipated look on his face. The film tries to get us to think of vampires in a different way, but the alternative we get here is boring as fuck. The icing on the turd cake is the irritatingly insistent music score by Joan and John Shakespeare (“Connecting Rooms”). It’s horribly off-key right from the word go.

A cheap, unbelievably boring horror item that cries out for some sex or violence, or a director with a sense of style or the surreal. Crushingly dull, this forgotten item is best left alone.

Rating: D-