This Hammer film opens with a murder. We see Peter Van Eyck in a carefully planned murder asphyxiate his wife with poison gas which he avoids. He's constructed a trap door beneath the floor of the room where he can breath through a snorkel. The police who if they searched the room a bit more thoroughly should have found his trap door hideaway. But the film is set in Spain where well to do British have summer homes. And the Spanish police as personified by Gregoire Aslan are lazy. Wouldn't catch Scotland Yard avoiding the obvious.
When his wife's daughter is brought in by her friend Betta St.John, Mandy Moore immediately accuses her stepfather Van Eyck of murder. Not only that of the murder of her real father. She's in obvious fear and we know she ought to be. But try and convince someone else most of all the cops.
Van Eyck tries many times to murder her, but no one sees him doing it. In the end he's caught in the device of his own making. Clever I thought.
But in what was obviously a tacked on ending Moore tells Aslan where to find Van Eyck. It truly ruined what was a clever idea for a justly earned revenge.
When his wife's daughter is brought in by her friend Betta St.John, Mandy Moore immediately accuses her stepfather Van Eyck of murder. Not only that of the murder of her real father. She's in obvious fear and we know she ought to be. But try and convince someone else most of all the cops.
Van Eyck tries many times to murder her, but no one sees him doing it. In the end he's caught in the device of his own making. Clever I thought.
But in what was obviously a tacked on ending Moore tells Aslan where to find Van Eyck. It truly ruined what was a clever idea for a justly earned revenge.