THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD

Jon Pertwee tries out his cloak

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971). Director: Peter Duffell. Screenplay by Robert Bloch.

"Dracula -- the one with Bela Lugosi, of course, not this new fellow." -- Paul Henderson

A well-known actor in horror films has disappeared from an old house he had rented, and this leads into the telling of four tales centered around this creepy domicile. In "Method for Murderer" a fiction writer's creation, a maniac (Tom Adams of The 2nd Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World), seems to come to life to cause havoc for which the writer (Denholm Elliott) is blamed. In "Waxworks," two men (Peter Cushing; Joss Ackland of Crescendo)  become obsessed with the wax figure of Salome, who reminds each of them of a lost love, whom -- you might say -- they lose their heads over. In "Sweets to the Sweet" the stern John Reid (Christopher Lee of The Horror of Dracula) hires a nanny (Nyree Dawn Porter) for his strange little girl, Jane (Chloe Franks), with terrible results. The fourth tale, "The Cloak," is an amusing black comedy in which actor Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee) finds a cloak in a shop which turns him into a vampire each time he puts it on; Ingrid Pitt is Anderson's female lead in this and is fine. But the best performances come from Cushing, Lee, Pertwee, and little Franks. The House that Dripped Blood is very entertaining, and is one of the best of the horror anthologies, not lame as some of Bloch's other screenplays.

Verdict: Chills and laughs all served up with relish. ***.