A rather tepic adaption of a play called The Man in Half Moon Street, that had earlier been filmed under that name in 1945. The stagey nature of this version definately announces its origins, and although sporting typically lush-looking Hammer sets, there’s not a whole lot going on here.
The plot revolves around Dr. George Bonnet, who we eventually learn has conquered aging and death by the periodic implant of a gland. Needless to say, here he is forced to get the gland through dubious means, and in end (spoiler, I guess) assumes his full age as he dies a horrible death. Similarities to the fate of Dorian Gray presumably were not entirely coincidental. Also very similar–but much better–is the later The Night Strangler, the second of the two Kolchak TV movies.
There are a number of problems here. One is that in order to be logical (I suppose), they don’t have Bonnet needlessly kill, and so the body count is rather low. This would hard hardly be a problem–even an advantage–if the rest of the picture were more interesting, but it’s not. Then, in an apparent effort to up the resultant low ‘horror’ quoitient, at one point Bonnet doesn’t get to his life-sustaining formula in time (hilariously, he needs to take this in private all the time, and yet constantly throws parties and such), and the result is, well, acid hands. Or some damn thing. I’m not sure how that works, but there you go.
Maybe the biggest concern is that there’s really not a single likeable character here. Bonnet is played by Anton Diffring, an actor who usually played Nazi officers. He’s both snobby and cowardly here, as he’s willing to kill others to avoid nature taking its toll. Attempts to make his partly symphathetic fall woefully short. The female lead (played by the recently deceased Hazel Court) comes across as a willful ninny, to the extent that you kind of wish she’d gotten kacked in the end.
And the, well, I guess, hero is played by Christopher Lee, and exhibits his trademark stiffly formal and coldly restrained manner. It’s hard to warm to Lee, despite how very talented of an actor he is, and they don’t remotely get that job done here. If you want Lee in a good heroic role, stick with The Devil Rides Out. Genre director Terence Fisher does what he can, but in the end the material is just too flimsy. Diffring, meanwhile, is more enjoyable in the far more colorful Circus of Horrors.
Legend Films has released the film on DVD, and it looks pretty decent. Certainly completists will wish to give it a look, but it’s at best a minor effort. I’d stick with renting this one.
