Horrors of the Black Museum

The first of Anglo-Amalgamated's loose trilogy of Sadian horror movies - the others being Circus of Horrors and Michael Powell's infinitely superior Peeping Tom - anticipates Powell's interest in voyeurism with its opening scene of a woman's eyes being gouged out by a pair of viciously spiked binoculars. Thereafter, as Gough's novelist devises a series of horrible crimes in order to make his work more appealing to a sensation-hungry readership, the film continues as a tacky catalogue of gratuitously nasty tortures and murders. Indeed, it's as lascivious and leering in its approach as the great British public it purports to condemn. Lurid and innuendo-laden, it's an intriguing oddity.