Howard Vernon

“Potent and poetic, mischievous and macabre, Borowczyk’s film shows how many imaginative worlds the horror movie can open up when the right artist holds the keys” (Nigel Andrews, Financial Times) It’s the engagement party for brilliant young Dr Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) and his fiancée, the beautiful Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro), attended by various pillars of Victorian society, including the astonishing Patrick Magee in one of his final roles. But when people are found raped and murdered outside and ultimately inside the house, it becomes clear that a madman has broken in to disrupt the festivities – but who is he? And why does Dr Jekyll keep sneaking off to his laboratory? We know the answer, of course, but Walerian Borowczyk’s visually stunning adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-filmed tale is crammed with wildly imaginative and outrageously perverse touches characteristic of the man who scandalised audiences with Immoral Tales and The Beast, not least the explicitly sexualised nature of Mr Hyde’s primal urges.

For his follow-up to Vampyros Lesbos, writer/director Jess Franco delivered perhaps his most twisted shocker of the 70s. In what fans and critics consider to be her greatest role, the luscious Soledad Miranda in one of her final performances before her tragic death stars as the vengeful widow who seduces then murders the men and women responsible for her husband's suicide.

Upon the death of her father Ernesto, young Christine leaves London and arrives at Monserrat Castle where she witnesses the opening of her father's will. The sole heir, the young woman feels uneasy because she senses that she is surrounded by a strange atmosphere both inside and outside the house.