FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)

 

(Director: Kevin Connor. Screenwriters: Robin Clarke and Raymond Christodoulou, based on R. Chetwynde Hayes’s published stories.)

Review

This entertaining and moralistic compendium horror film was released in Britain in 1974 and stateside in 1976.

The wraparound story features Peter Cushing (THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1957) as The Proprietor of an antiques shop, Temptations Limited: Offers You Can’t Resist. Four characters─lead characters in each of the four following stories─cheat or lie to The Proprietor while negotiating purchases from him. Of course, bad things happen to them. Ben Howard played the “Burglar.”

 

In the first tale, “The Gate Crasher,” a young man (Edward Charlton, played by David Warner) buys an antique mirror for far less than its market value, takes it home, holds a séance with friends, inadvertently waking the spirit that lives in a mist-filled alternative world beyond its glass-and-fake-gold frame. When that spirit (The Face, played by Marcel Steiner) demands that Charlton murder people for their blood, the young man is compelled to do so.

 

“An Act of Kindness” begins when an unhappily married, middle-aged office worker, Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen), befriends─with what he views as a harmless fib─a war-vet match-seller (Jim Underwood, played by Donald Pleasence) on the street. This leads to an affair with Underwood’s daughter, Emily (Angela Pleasence), black magick and deaths that Lowe fails to foresee. Diana Dors played Mabel Lowe, Christopher’s derisive wife.

 

The third tale, “The Elemental,” is titled for a malevolent spirit that haunts Reginald Warren (Ian Carmichael) after he exchanges the pipe’s price tag for a cheaper one in The Proprietor’s antique shop. The elemental terrorizes him and his wife, causing him to contact a spiritualist (Madame Orloff, played by Margaret Leighton) to rid them of the pestiferous supernatural being.

 

 In “The Door,” a young man, William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) buys an ornate, monster-faced door. The item is delivered to Seaton’s house, used to replace a closet door, transforming the closet into an antique, shadowy and blue-lit room─an alternate realm, with a strange, menacing man inside it. Lesley Ann-Down played Rosemary Seaton, Ian’s wife.