Catacombs

For any fans of Hammer’s psychological black and white thrillers of the early 1960s, I can report that you’d love this British Lion production, too – yet another Brit ripoff of Les diaboliques … A few nifty scares pepper this one, bolstered with an excellent Carlo Martelli score conducted by Philip Martell, some fine performances and some really effective horror and murder scenes.

The plot is routine, involving a corpse buried in the potting shed and ghostly happenings arranged to drive the duped killer insane, but the direction is quietly effective and gives a foretaste of the bravura sequences Hessler was to achieve in his later, very uneven but consistently interesting, work such as The Oblong Box and Scream and Scream Again.