After the success of "The Haunted Strangler", producer Robert Gordon made "Corridors of Blood", another movie with the elder statesman of horror actors, Boris Karloff, in the lead role.
He plays a similar character here to the one he played in "Strangler", and has an almost identical character arc. In that film he was a social campaigner driven to clear the name of a long-executed criminal; in "Corridors of Blood", he plays a doctor attempting to discover the first anaesthetic after some of his patients lose their minds due to the pain they experience in surgery.
Both roles for Karloff were good men led tragically astray. Here, the role is much more convincing; Karloff was a great actor whose most famous role as Frankenstein's monster didn't even scratch the surface of his talent. You can feel how much this character cares about his patients. He genuinely wants to help them and is surrounded by people who do not share his passion.
If his colleagues had been more interested, perhaps Karloff's Doctor Bolton wouldn't have gone so far astray that he starts working for a gang of criminals led by the low-key, terrifying and creepy Christopher Lee. And perhaps he wouldn't have started experimenting on himself with gases, and becoming addicted.
You see, "Corridors of Blood" is also a quasi-Jekkyl and Hyde type story, like "Haunted Strangler" was, though it stops short at getting Karloff to take his dentures out. The problem with the movie is that it stops short too much in general, like the filmmakers didn't have the heart to make a horror movie. The set-up is fantastic and could have been used to make a great historical drama. But its descent into horror fails to move us. The movie is also fantastically shot, so why do the scenes of horror make so little impact? It's like they didn't want to take the movie down that road, but had to.
He plays a similar character here to the one he played in "Strangler", and has an almost identical character arc. In that film he was a social campaigner driven to clear the name of a long-executed criminal; in "Corridors of Blood", he plays a doctor attempting to discover the first anaesthetic after some of his patients lose their minds due to the pain they experience in surgery.
Both roles for Karloff were good men led tragically astray. Here, the role is much more convincing; Karloff was a great actor whose most famous role as Frankenstein's monster didn't even scratch the surface of his talent. You can feel how much this character cares about his patients. He genuinely wants to help them and is surrounded by people who do not share his passion.
If his colleagues had been more interested, perhaps Karloff's Doctor Bolton wouldn't have gone so far astray that he starts working for a gang of criminals led by the low-key, terrifying and creepy Christopher Lee. And perhaps he wouldn't have started experimenting on himself with gases, and becoming addicted.
You see, "Corridors of Blood" is also a quasi-Jekkyl and Hyde type story, like "Haunted Strangler" was, though it stops short at getting Karloff to take his dentures out. The problem with the movie is that it stops short too much in general, like the filmmakers didn't have the heart to make a horror movie. The set-up is fantastic and could have been used to make a great historical drama. But its descent into horror fails to move us. The movie is also fantastically shot, so why do the scenes of horror make so little impact? It's like they didn't want to take the movie down that road, but had to.