Popular reviews

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  Review by sakana1 ★★½ 19

  Spoilers for the end of the film in the last long paragraph.

  Horrors of the Black Museum is an incredibly strange schlock horror flick, about grisly murders and the reporter (Michael Gough as Edmond Bancroft) who is so obsessed with them that he has to get emergency treatment for shock every time another one is committed (to be clear, his shock is gleeful shock, not the distressed kind). Every woman in it two-dimension (if she's lucky) and either there to kill or despise, the cops are so laconic that the movie can't even be called a procedural, since all they do is hang out, and there's a murder room that, for some reason, is full of big computers that make…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 6

  1st Arthur Crabtree

  I shouldn't like this film. Every bone in my body tells me that this is the most stupid, wooden, inept horror film ever made in the UK. That it has all the dialogue finesse of a Mac truck and a direction style that borders on the catatonic. That Michael Gough is the only actor with any rough level of acting talent, and even that is just him violently consuming the flat, blandly lit cinematography as if it's his last meal. That the plot, about a crime writer who stages a series of bizarre murders for the pure fun of it, is so ridiculous, the murders so absurd, that you shouldn't be able to watch it without bursting…

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  Review by hiruko ★★★½

  “Rick, let’s go in the Tunnel of Love.”

  Michael Gough sporting the most amazing two-toned hair, stars in this ridiculously fun film. Wasn’t the tag line for Happy Birthday to Me, something like Witness six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see! with the dude about to be skewered with the kebab on the poster? Well Happy Birthday was outdone twenty years earlier with Horrors of the Black Museum. This movie set the precedent on the slasher’s hook of how will the next victim die?. But to the tune of some thick schlocky moments blended with a vintage comic book narrative. It shines like a kid film for messed up kids. It’s too out there to be an actual…

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  Review by mosquitodragon ★★★½ 9

  This film is not without its flaws, the most prominent of those being a rather lethargic pace. In fact, it seems odd to accuse it of sluggishness because the moments of bizarre freneticism are Horrors of the Black Museum's most memorable aspects - but it has to be said, these highlights are spread out between some interminable scenes of police procedural and strange melodrama.

  Michael Gough's performance really leaves all subtlety behind and his constant dialed up presence is itself a jarring juxtaposition with a lot of British bureaucracy and dullness. I suspect the contrast is intentional, because the film seems to take great glee in its sudden lurches into lurid sleaze and violence. The overall effect is close to…

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  Review by teamgal ★★½

  Starts strong, playing like an audition for PEEPING TOM, but it lacks energy and, even at 81 minutes, drags on. I won't object to the screenplay that relies almost entirely on talking, the performances that are embarrassingly overwrought, nor the endless parade of unconvincing interiors, but those blonde streaks in Michael Gough's hair? Absolutely not.

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  Review by Richie_Rott ★★½

  "I know, I'm sensitive to murder."

  Cheapie British b-movie flick. Filled with some funny camp moments, like getting a check-up from your doctor while smoking a massive cigar. To say that Michael Gough's performance was hammy is an understatement. Ham & cheese always a good combination.

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★½ 2

  52 horror film challenge 2019: 40/52.
  No. 38: Colour in the title.

  Perhaps the most outrageous opening in 1950s British cinema, in which a booby-trapped pair of glasses stab out a woman's eyes, settles into a long series of admittedly beautiful Technicolor scenes of people standing around and talking to each other in rooms. But then, I did watch this in Tel-e-Vision™, the groundbreaking medium which brings the magic of cinema onto a small screen on your wall! Special glasses are needed to watch Tel-e-Vision™ if you are short- or long-sighted.

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  Review by Ken Coffelt ★★★

  While not a really great film, I’m willing to bet if I’d seen Horrors of the Black Museum as a kid, I might have really dug it.

  It’s a wacky concept, so specific. Scotland Yard has a “black museum”, essentially a museum of crime and criminality. Though initially created to educate and enlighten the police, it’s long been an actual museum.

  In Horrors, someone has taken these curios and started re-using them, perhaps the most unusual and outlandish. The eye-popping beginning has a young woman receive a fancy new pair of binoculars that stab through to her brain. Another involves a guillotine bed.

  See, there is genuine fun here. Moderate fun, but fun.

  Director Arthur Crabtree had just come off the extremely fun Fiend without a Face (1958). It’s not a must-see per-se, but I’m happy to have watched it.

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  Review by Kevin ★★★

  Horrors of the Black Museum is a fun, lurid b horror movie. The film doesn't do anything particularly outstanding. Unfortunately it does drag at points in spite of its short runtime. Though it's elevated by fun, creative death scenes and a delightfully camp performance by Michael Gough. The film is worth seeing just for the opening binoculars scene alone.

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★

  Can I borrow your face? I want to scare my boss.

  A fantastic opening scene and the final set piece is decent. There are also some interesting moments, but unfortunately it’s all held together with a lot of boring monologues.

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1959 Ranked

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  Review by Rick D ★★★

  A fun late 50's British horror piece.

  Veteran actor, Michael Gough, is a physically damaged successful author of serial killer books who also runs a secretive Black Museum. The museum contains objects and artifacts of death.

  A recent string of murders has the city on edge as gals are being murdered in brutal ways using all kinds of objects. Spikes in the eyepiece of binoculars, the guillotine, etc.

  The horror is implied and well done.

  Add in the fact that Gough has a protege, Graham Curnow, who injects a serum turning him into a Jekyll and Hyde type person and this movie is a wild ride.

  The gals in this one are worth the price of admission. June Cunningham is…

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  Review by Joe ★★★½

  In the Michael-Gough-psycho-killer corpus, this has a stronger suspense schematic than Black Zoo, but a less nuanced performance from Gough, so it's a wash. Here, Gough plays a crime writer who's actually a crime doer, with a flair for outlandish murder weapons like a pair of binoculars with blades in the lenses.

  Had this series continued, I would have liked to have seen Black Pizzeria, Terror of the Black Laundromat, and The Ghastly Black Pachinko Parlor.