Boris Karloff

Betta St. John

Christopher Lee

Finlay Currie

Adrienne Corri

Francis de Wolff

Francis Matthews

Frank Pettingell

Basil Dignam

Nigel Green

Yvonne Romain

Howard Lang

Charles Lloyd Pack

Bernard Archard

Marianne Stone

Desmond Llewelyn

Skip Martin

Peter Mayhew

Robert Day

Geoffrey Faithfull

Jean Scott Rogers

Anthony Masters

Wally Schneiderman

Charles F. Vetter

John Croydon

Richard Gordon

Buxton Orr

Peter Bolton

Eileen Warwick

Maurice Askew

George Mills

Michael Stevenson

Susan Dyson

Cyril Swern

Drama

Horror

Crime

Corridors of Blood

Producers Associates

Amalgamated Productions

United Kingdom

A lot of fun watching two great horror icons together like Boris Karloff and Sir Christopher Lee. I'm so glad The Criterion Collection bothered putting this foursome out in their 'Monsters and Madmen' boxed set. Such a guilty pleasure to behold, in its intriguing period-piece script of a well-meaning doctor trying to discover anesthesia yet getting drug-addicted in the process. Great stuff.

I'm so close to surgery without pain. 

Dr. Thomas Bolton is one of London's top surgeons, brilliant and fast, he is however constantly troubled by the amount of pain his patients go through, for this be a time before anaesthesia. Painstakingly working on a formula to put patients to sleep during surgery, Bolton is convinced he has found a breakthrough, but upon trialling it in front of the board it goes terribly wrong. He continues undaunted, but as he keeps testing the formula out on himself he becomes badly addicted, unable to get the hospital board to sanction his research, he gets involved with a dastardly group of murderers who kill and then sell off corpse's to a suspect doctor.

Make no (saw) bones about it, this is a wonderful Boris Karloff performance, the amount of sympathy and earthy fortitude he puts into Dr. Bolton is very impressive. The plot isn't up to much and fans of staple horror requirements will hardly get any titillation from it, but as a crime picture and a character study it comes out smiling and delivers the goods. The sets are very good, check out the frontal entry into the Seven Dials area, and now with better digital transfers the picture's black and white texture ripens the watching experience. It's a film that I suppose is easily forgotten quickly after the viewing, but it's well worth watching for Karloff's turn and an ending that is strangely sad but uplifting at the same time. 6/10

English

Darren Bousman on CORRIDORS OF BLOOD