There are a lot, just like a music compilation, of disappointments with a segmented arrangement. Much like an orange that's maybe got a 'segment' on the turn, I find these horror anthology films. The three mainstays of this genre, this film, Doctor Terror's House of Horror and Tales from the Crypt are the best known. One way to view it is to remember those segments that were most memorable when you hadn't seen the film for years. My most memorable one is 'The neat job', with Terry-Thomas and Glynis Johns, where the neat-freaked Mr Thomas plays Arthur, an astute, rich and successful oldie now looking to finally settle down with a little wife, in the form of posh but impoverished Glynis Johns as Eleanor. It's not long before his neatist ways surface after she tries to re-arrange the rooms/furniture whatever else would be out of place to him. Eleanor, bored one evening, slightly on edge awaiting Arthur's also punctual return, accidentally knocks things over and in attending to them, in turn indirectly causes more mayhem and mess/damage - not advisable for a neat freak who's about to return home in ten minutes! It nicely reaches a point where even though Eleanor has had many shriekings from Arthur before, he catches her in his workshop, after trying to re-hang a picture she'd knocked off the wall with a nail. On seeing the mess, Arthur lets rip, but we cut to Eleanor's face like a raging tiger and thumping Arthur on the nut violently with the hammer in her hand. It doesn't quite end there. It shows Eleanor pleasantly walking around stating 'you said I couldn't be neat' "well", she goes on to say, "everything's in its place NOW Arthur". A large wall shows lots of jars with Arthur's body parts, properly labelled-up. Some have questioned as we do, whether Arthur should find himself within the final roll-call of Curd Jurgens end (Epitaph?) for all the bad people who ended up in a sticky end as truly evil enough, but he was still torturing poor old Eleanor! I found the one with Mr Jurgens and Dawn Addams familiar too. A serious magician finds an act in India, a magic rope trick too good to be true. The daughter/assistant of the fakir-like chap refuses to sell it to him so he murders her. Dawn Addams tries out the the trick by climbing the rope and suddenly looks up and screams, and, disappears, disturbingly as if taken into another world, with a patch of blood on the ceiling, then the rope calmly wraps itself around Jurgens' neck and strangles him - we then see the girl, whom was murdered, back with the rope trick in the market - as if to say she has all power with the rope trick, a bit like Robert De Niro's part as Al Capone in 'The Untouchables' 'If someone messes with me, I'm gonna mess with them!'. Tom Baker's Voodoo one is easy, but still watchable - the artist whose career could've done better was brought to that by critics who who panned his paintings so they then bought them cheap and you guessed it, sold them for a massive profit. As Baker enlists a voodoo-man or Witch Doctor if you like, as he's in a kind of self-imposed exile in the Caribbean somewhere, you can guess he's going to paint rather than stick pins in a doll (As he asks the latter, he's reminded as an artist he can just 'paint' to do his deeds). Again, the three men who wronged him, have portraits painted by Baker and are naturally dissected, (One loses his eyes, another, his hands and Denholm Elliot's character shoots himself). Baker has forgotten his own portrait though, locked in a safe and forgetting also he needs air! He manages to open the safe in time to stop HIMSELF suffocating. Trouble is, he has left it out and below a skylight where a painter (Of the decorating kind) is on a platform, spills some stripper which crashes through the skylight and nicely smudges away Baker's self-portrait. Next it cuts to the latter running across a road into the path of a lorry and getting smudged horribly himself! The other stories in this include a good tongue-in-cheek one with the Masseys about vampires. Daniel Massey kills his own sister and then finds himself unwittingly in a restaurant of the vamps, add to that his dead sister and all put a tap into his neck, like a beer keg, and have a blood fest. The other story with Michael Craig and Edward Judd about faking death to cop the insurance, only for Craig to find himself really dead. Curd Jurgens leads the way in explaining how the men met up - to repeat and suffer telling these stories to one another each night for eternity. Simliar of course to the other two films mentioned. A welcome, kitsch Britsh-horror type flick!
Review of The Vault of Horror
