Corridors of Blood (1962)

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Main Menu Audio Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1962
Running Time	85:44
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Robert Day
Studio Distributor	Amalgamated Prod Umbrella Entertainment	Starring	Boris Karloff Betta St. John Finlay Currie Francis Matthews Adrienne Corri Francis De Wolff Basil Dignam Frank Pettingell Carl Bernard Marian Spencer Nigel Green John Gabriel Howard Lang
Case	?
RPI	Box	Music	Buxton Orr

London 1840 - Before the discovery of Anaesthesia

Opening intertitle

    Boris Karloff plays the high profile but sensitive drug addicted surgeon Thomas Bolton at London’s most prestigious hospital. He despises the fact that he has to perform surgery on conscious patients and the horrible pain it puts them through. Experimenting with a mixture of opium and other chemicals, he tries out a new form of gas believing it will put his patients to sleep. However, when the gas has the opposite effect and turns his patient violent, Bolton is humiliated in front of his peers and slides further into addiction.

    During a drug-induced haze, Bolton leaves his diary containing all his research notes at a local bar. When it’s stolen by the unscrupulous body-trader Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee), Bolton is blackmailed into signing death certificates so that he can earn enough money to satisfy his craving and continue his experiments.

    Loosely based on the life of US dentist Horace Wells, who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide for painless teeth extraction in 1844, Corridors of Blood is perhaps Boris Karloff’s finest performance since playing the iconic Frankenstein’s monster. Like his character in Michael Reeves’ marvellous The Sorcerers, Dr Bolton becomes a victim of his own passionate desire to do good, but circumstances turn him bad. In The Sorcerers Karloff’s dilemma was to allow his elderly wife to feel the vitality of youth again, while Corridors has him laying his reputation on the line to ultimately advance medical science after falling to pieces when trying to operate on a little girl.

    Regretfully, the sadistic manner in which the surgical procedures are executed threaten to overwhelm the beautifully detailed gothic sets, aware script and enormous talents of Karloff and Lee. The lingering close-ups showing the contorted faces of patients screaming in agony, the slicing open of limbs and the heart-wrenching scenes involving the little girl are shocking images that detract from the narrative’s insightful messages.

Video

    After a rough start, this turns out to be a very crisp 1.29:1 black and white transfer. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    For what is a very dark print, shadow detail clarity is generally very good. There a few moments such as at 34:20 and 37:10 where Christopher Lee’s black cloak melts into the background, but these instances inadvertently draw attention to his ruggedly nasty demeanour rather than being a problem. Black levels are inky and free of low level noise and contrast is stable.

    One thing I did notice is that some scenes have a slight green tinge, like at 8:00, 42:29 and 49:24, which I assume is suggestive of the age of the print.

    There was only some mild edge enhancement and aliasing detected, but these film-to-video artefacts are not distracting at all.

    Film artefacts like scratches, blemishes and fine hair lines plague the opening sequence, but the print clears up quite dramatically after a few minutes.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
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Film Artefacts
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Audio

    The Dolby Digital 2.0 mono mix is adequate. The dramatic orchestrated opening title theme by Buxton Orr wonderfully sets the tone.

    The sound effects and orchestrated meanderings used during Karloff’s paranoid drug-affected scenes are subtle and non-melodramatic.

    The soundtrack demonstrates only a slight amount of hiss during dialogue delivery, but the spoken word is clearly audible.

    Being a mono mix the surrounds and subwoofer are silent.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Letterboxed theatrical trailer (un-countered approx 2-minutes)

    Shock! Shock! Shock! In all the history of horror pictures nothing so shocking on the screen…

    An overwrought voice-over delivers a plethora of “shocking” trashy clichés in this trailer which is exploitative and totally misses the mark.

    The Region 1 Image Entertainment single disc edition is identical in content to our own version.

    Our Region 4 is excellent value as it comes with two other essential Karloff films: The Haunted Strangler and The Sorcerers in a nicely presented Superstars of Horror: Volume 2 box set.

    Originally completed in 1958 under the title The Doctor of Seven Dials but not released until 1962, Corridors of Blood bombed on its theatrical release. Marketed as an exploitative horror movie (the theatrical trailer has Christopher Lee molesting Yvonne Romain while the narrator shouts “Shock!...Shock!...Shock!”), it’s little wonder audiences at the time felt cheated by the film’s high drama and medical-documentary style approach.

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Audio
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Plot
Overall