Cauldron of Blood [El coleccionista de cadáveres] [Blind Man’s Buff] * (1971, Boris Karloff, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Viveca Lindfors) – Classic Movie Review 5615

‘Tops In Total Horror!’ – even the advertising line sounds like a translation! Boris Karloff plays a blind sculptor, Charles Badulescu, who uses real people’s skeletons as the basis for his unorthodox artworks in this late-career, Spanish-made Euro-chiller.

Unbeknownst to him, Badulescu’s leather-fetishist and whip-wielding killer wife Tania (Viveca Lindfors) and her lover provide the corpses by murdering people and dumping their bodies into an acid bath they keep in their basement laboratory.

After their friend Helga (Dyanik Zurakowska) is killed in this way, a journalist called Claude Marchand (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and his girlfriend arrive to investigate.

Co-writer/ director Edward Mann’s 1971 horror movie, written with John Melson, is all pretty lurid and desperate, but it has its moments with its good cast and premise, and Karloff still impresses in old age.

Also in the cast are Jacqui Speed, Rosenda Monteros, Milo Quesada and Rubén Rojo.

The director’s real name in Santos Alcocer.

It was released on DVD in the UK with an episode  from Karloff’s 1954 Colonel March of Scotland Yard TV series, The Silver Curtain.

It was made in Spain at the Estudios Roma, Madrid, in 1967 but only finally released by Cannon Films after the deaths of both star Karloff and director Mann in 1971.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5615

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