Review: Corridors of Blood

Set in 1840s London, Boris Karloff plays a kindly and well-meaning surgeon who loathes the pain his surgeries cause patients in the pre-anaesthesia era. He starts to experiment on himself with an early attempt at anaesthesia, with disastrous results. Karloff gets addicted to the chemicals he’s using, and falls in with dastardly slum denizens Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and the murderous Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee). This fiendish and greedy duo are in the business of killing and selling corpses and need someone in the medical profession to be able to sign the death certificates to profit from their victims (though the deadly Resurrection Joe also seems to just enjoy killing people for the sake of it). So they blackmail poor Karloff. Betta St. John and Francis Matthews play the requisite young lovers, the latter playing Karloff’s concerned son. Desmond Llewellyn can briefly be seen observing one of Karloff’s painful surgeries.

 

Perhaps if I’d seen this 1958 variation on the Burke and Hare tale much earlier, I’d have liked it a bit more. Directed by Robert Day (“The Haunted Strangler”, “The Green Man”, Hammer’s “She”, and a lot of TV movies) and scripted by Jean Scott Rogers (a few minor TV credits), there’s some things here I very much like. However, after wanting desperately to see this first collaboration between Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff on the silver screen for many years now, I have to say it didn’t feel like anything special. In fact, I didn’t feel much better or worse about it than the second and less well-regarded pairing of Lee and Karloff, “The Curse of the Crimson Altar”. And again, I think a lot of it comes down to familiarity, as the film feels like a mixture of the Burke and Hare story (told many times on screen, most effectively with Karloff as “The Body Snatcher”), “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, and Karloff and Day’s underrated “The Haunted Strangler” from the same year. The thing is, I’ve watched several versions (official and unofficial) of the Burke and Hare story as well as Jekyll and Hyde over the last 12 months alone, and I’ve watched “The Haunted Strangler” many times over the years. So I guess I came to this one at the wrong time. The makers of the later “Edge of Sanity” certainly must’ve seen this film before making that rather mediocre 1989 Jekyll and Hyde re-telling. Frankly though, this film’s also not especially good anyway beyond the familiarity. It’s very, very dry in parts.

 

Things start well, with an ominous opening title card: ‘London 1840, before the discovery of anaesthesia’. Yikes. The following amputation procedure doesn’t disappoint, either. The film’s rather uncompromising attitude towards ancient medical procedure is probably one of its strengths. However, as much as Boris Karloff is in pitch-perfect form, playing a well-meaning doctor whose experiments on himself to develop an enduring anaesthesia, the results are exactly what anyone who has ever watched a couple of movies before would expect. He’s terrific, but I’ve already watched Karloff do this well-meaning, remorseful schtick plenty of times before. And what a shameful waste of an absolutely stellar cast of British character actors! Poor Francis Matthews and the lovely Betta St. John (who was quite good opposite Christopher Lee in “City of the Dead”) are given your standard young romantic lead parts, the sort of thing you’d get in many a Hammer Horror film, but in this non-Hammer film they’re given far less interesting versions of those characters to play. Every scene with them is frankly a bit of a bore, through no fault of the actors themselves. It’s just that the film moves so slowly that Karloff truly only hooks up with the body snatchers after 65 minutes of a less than 90 minute film. So you kinda resent anything that doesn’t involve that critical aspect. Also getting short shrift is poor Nigel Green, a very solid character actor whose Inspector character only turns up in the final third of the film. That tends to happen quite a bit in these 50s and 60s British horror films, and it never ceases to annoy me.

 

Faring best among the cast are a scene-stealing Francis de Wolff and a young-ish Christopher Lee as the seedy, ghastly villains of the piece. Veteran character actor de Wolff gets more screen time and doesn’t disappoint, he’s wonderfully sleazy in one of his best roles. A facially disfigured Lee (A year after “Curse of Frankenstein” and the same year as “The Horror of Dracula”) plays a disreputable character named Resurrection Joe and is pure black-hearted evil and cut-throat dangerousness. They’re not in the film quite enough for my liking, but you appreciate their every moment nonetheless. The film has been well-shot in seedy, sleazy B&W by Geoffrey Faithfull (“Village of the Damned”, “Murder She Said”), easily one of the best things about the film.

 

As much as Karloff is terrific here (and he’s in this more than in “Curse of the Crimson Altar”) he can’t save the film single-handedly, and de Wolff and Lee aren’t in the film enough to help him out quite enough. It starts well and every scene involving rotters Francis de Wolff and Christopher Lee is terrific. The rest is a bit familiar and clichéd, I’m afraid. It’s more drama than horror, and unfortunately the drama is slow-moving and talky. It also feels like they’ve tried to throw in too many elements to the plot instead of just focussing on one or two. Good-looking, well-acted, there are good elements here. It might even be worth a watch for the cast and to see Karloff playing quite the undignified drug-addicted mess. However, it’s rather dry and ultimately very disappointing. If you’re looking for a horror film, this probably won’t quite satisfy you. The title is particularly misleading. Karloff fans are better off watching “The Body Snatcher” (one of the best horror films ever made) or “The Haunted Strangler”.

 

Rating: C+