Chad

Trevor

Was this one of the films on that Monsters and Madmen set?

TheBigDave

Corridors of Blood is available at Hulu and Amazon Prime.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/225632
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006JIVKM4

DaveyJoe

Yes sir. All of the flicks were pretty enjoyable, but I particularly enjoyed this and The Haunted Strangler.

Mondo Kane

I believe this was the very first time I saw Karloff & Lee on the screen together. Brief nerdgasm moment!

TheBigDave

This didn't seem like a Horror film. There wasn't any suspense. Actually, with that ending, it seems more like a historical biography film.

I really enjoyed The Haunted Strangler. Karloff was awesome in that one. A great classic horror film.

Trevor

Thanks, dug around storage and found my set earlier today.

I think I watched the entire set 5 or so OHMCs ago, may try that again tonight if I can pull an allnighter.

numbercrunch

its not a horror film in my mind either, but a docu-drama about the discovery of anesthesia. I have worked in healthcare for 25 years so i found it interesting

ruemorgue10

The screams of the patients being operated on without anesthesia certainly horrified me. Maybe not a horror film in the traditional sense, but it was pretty damn disturbing.

orlmac

It certainly didn't seem to be a traditional horror film to me but I still enjoyed it thoroughly. I think Boris Karloff is an excellent actor and he did a good job here. I felt Christopher Lee was somewhat wasted but my wife said she enjoyed it and that was all I needed to hear for it to be a successful subset pick for me!

rbrown498

I thought that it was slightly better than okay, but it didn't grab me like a similarly-set film, The Flesh and the Fiends (aka Mania), did. I enjoyed seeing Lee and Karloff together, and Betta St. John is real purdy, but I found my attention wandering a bit in the middle.

I find it odd that this film had to wait four years to get a wide release in the country where it was made, and that it took five years to come out in the US. To add insult to injury, in the US at least, Corridors of Blood was first released as the bottom half of a double bill with Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory.

Christopher Lee sure did get a lot of acid thrown in his face in the 1950s.

Undeadcow

I really liked the psychological aspects of this movie as the doctor was slowly consumed by addiction/drive towards eventual murder. Boris Karloff carries the movie through much of it's 'slow burn' approach really 'selling' himself as a tormented surgeon. At times the pacing seemed too slow. I didn't realize it was a loose depiction of real events and it makes me wonder more about the factual basis. The 'historical' atmosphere was nice. The title Corridors of Blood title is hilariously sensationalized, personally I was hoping for more corridors.

DaveyJoe

Corridors of Blood (1959)

Boris Karloff stars as a sensitive, aging surgeon who is desperate to unlock the secret of as of yet undiscovered anesthesia. His peers dismiss his experiments as folly, convinced that with the knife, comes pain. A failed demonstration leaves him disgraced and he spirals down the path of addiction as his experiments grow more and more dangerous. He enlists the help of graverobbers who are creating their own corpses to get paid.

Karloff's performance is the big highlight here. I always forget that he's more than a groaning, shuffling monster from the Frankenstein films. This is an interesting story about an aspect of modern medicine we take for granted. Christopher Lee also appears, but fans of his may find him underutilized as a mostly quiet, but menacing thug. The film comes screeching to a halt when the doctor's son and his love interest are on screen, sucking the life out of the movie with their completely unnecessary subplot. Luckily that doesn't happen to often and the film mostly stays focused on Karloff's descent into desperation.


This film is no less horror than Jaws or Green Room. It's got drug-fueled hallucinations, multiple murders by a group of rogues, sawed-off limbs, and a cast featuring Karloff and Lee. If this movie were made in the mid 90s by David Cronenberg featuring modern gore and a pulsing soundtrack, we wouldn't question its inclusion in the challenge. I'm sure this film was horrifying for audiences of 1959, and the scene of Karloff performing surgery on a conscious and sobbing little girl was as disturbing as anything I'm likely to watch this month. I think sometimes we get hung up on the shallow definition of horror and forget that character driven descents into madness can be one of the scariest kinds of stories.

Shack

I'd seen this movie before for a previous challenge but it was great to revisit it this year. I agree that it's not strictly a horror film, but there's an air of dread and suspense as the plot unfolds that works for me. The idea of surgery without anesthesia is perhaps, for me, the scariest thing around. And there are enough surprises along the way to make it watchable.

[Confession: Whenever I watch a Karloff movie, I hear The Grinch.]

arw6040

^ I agree surgery without anethesia is one of the scariest things around as someone with very low pain tolerance having chronic illnesses myself. I thought the acting was good and interesting because I don't see many films on this subject. It may not be traditional horror like I expected but it was intriguing. Not sure I'd ever revisit though because nothing special stuck out to me other than thinking it was good for a first time watch.

WillieMLF

This one was fun for me. Ended up watching Corridors followed by The Haunted Strangler. I enjoyed both of these, and may revisit one for the commentary later this month. Sunday night, watched and ended up really liking First Man Into Space quite a bit. Listened to some of the commentary and it was pretty interesting.