Megamind
To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
Derrick Gibbons
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
Kirandeep Yoder
The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.
Rainey Dawn
I love some of the older British horror films and Michael Gough but I could not get into this film at all. It was just boring to me, nothing that stood out and grabbed my attention. Not even the first murder interested me the way it was done.I guess the murders themselves are the reason this film is classified a horror film but it looks, feels and plays out more like a regular crime flick to me with some out of the ordinary murders occurring. So the film bored me to tears - just not my thing. Nothing special.I'm not going to say it's awful but I will say I did not enjoy it and I found it less than mediocre.2/10
Sean Jump
Though younger viewers will remember Michael Gough more for his role of Alfred in the 1989 version of Batman (and its sequels), Mr. Gough had a long and distinguished career in film. He played Arthur Holmwood to great effect in Horror of Dracula, and went on to play the villainous lead in a number of other horror films. Horrors of the Black Museum is a very good thriller which Gough dominates from beginning to end with his strong on screen presence and distinctive, rich voice and aristocratic mannerisms. Gough was a consummate professional, but it really seems that he had a lot of fun playing the role of Edmond Bancroft, the arrogant and rather shady crime writer who feeds off of murder like an insatiable parasite. The cast does a fine job overall, including Graham Curnow as Bancroft's assistant, Rick, a young man with great ambitions who can't seem to break out from his boss's stifling shadow. Plus, there are two particularly beautiful ladies on hand: June Cunningham is spectacular as Joan, Bancroft's rather rebellious kept woman, and Shirley Anne Field is pretty and appealing as Rick's girlfriend, the innocent Angela. The story is well-written, takes several twists and turns, and gradually goes from being a straightforward murder mystery to something of a mad scientist's tale. There are many clever touches in the movie, particularly with regards to the several highly creative death scenes, and the climax is genuinely shocking and tragic. Though not especially bloody by modern standards, Horrors of the Black Museum pushed the envelope for explicit violence for its day, and thanks to a well-managed build-up of drama and suspense retains its ability to thrill even in the 21st century.
sossy65
As another reviewer mentioned, this film was horrifying to those of us who saw it as kids when it first came out. Horrors of the Black Museum was produced before technical effects became morph-driven and so fake they're not believable (even though they might be scary). Unlike Fiend Without a Face (also mentioned in these reviews) or The Blob, this movie doesn't rely on mechanically produced monsters. which means an imaginative child or paranoid adult could perhaps picture its horrors actually happening. A stretch, surely, but still . . .Pre-movie sequence demonstrating colors and hypnosis was funny and hokey even when the film was first released. The horrors, however, had many children (me included) suffering from nightmares for years. The binocular scene was particularly frightening, but not as frightening as the beheading scene. I cautiously checked the tall bedroom ceiling in the old farmhouse where I grew up for a long while after seeing this flick.Overall, after getting over the heebie-jeebies that lingered for years afterward, I have fond memories of this film. Anyone who is a fan of the 1950s chiller genre might enjoy the dated look and feel of it as well as the scare-factor it can generate in a viewer.
Coventry
"Horror of the Black Museum" is incredibly dated, unimportant and overly silly but it remains great fun to watch and watch it again. The opening sequence is delicious and definitely the best part of the entire movie. It involves the supposedly third strange and random murder in the London region and shows a poor woman getting her eyes gouged out by a pair of ingeniously spiked binoculars. A better opening to a colorful horror movie is hard to imagine and you're automatically preparing yourself to see a blackly comical and sadist horror gem. The quality-level of this intro naturally can't be held up throughout the entire movie but the script remains involving and surprising enough to keep you amused for a good 80 minutes. Scotland Yard hasn't got a clue where to begin their investigation and – on top of that – they're constantly annoyed by the vain columnist and pulp-novelist Ed Bancroft. The mysterious killer's identity isn't kept secret for long (I even assume it wasn't meant to be a secret) but his/her insane persona is imaginatively deepened. The "Black Museum" is a technical term to describe the police archive of bizarre and unusual murder weapons that were used in murder cases. The killer here has such a private collection himself which provides the film with a couple of utterly cool gimmicks, like the previously mentioned binoculars, an acid-bath and even a mini-guillotine! Michael Gough is seemly having a great time portraying the cripple cynic Bancroft. His performance is more than decent yet I agree with another reviewer here who already claimed that this role would be even more fit for Vincent Price. This film was the first entry of a Sadian horror trilogy, the others being the 1960 "Circus of Horrors" and "Peeping Tom". "Horror of the Black Museum" is the weakest of the three but still a terrifically odd and sensational genre highlight.
