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And a decent attempt to adapt the Dennis Wheatley novel to screen, which anyone who has read the book will know would be no mean feat since it was clearly not written for the screen. There are some scenes which have been omitted which could have made the movie more frightening but if all those scenes were kept in the feature would have been twice as long.
The actors are perfect for their respective roles of occult super villain and van helsing style white wizard, the ending of the movie is a little bit of a let down, especially if you have read the book, and it wont make perfect sense beyond a sort of smultz "love conquers all".
In the book the return to sender nature of spells which are repealed by protective magic is a little better elaborated and there is also a little about matriarchal spell binding and strange old books which only a mother could read.
I really could recommend this to anyone, whether as a Hammer Horror film, a good Dennis Wheatley adaptation (I think they made To The Devil A Daughter and it was nothing like the book at all) or as a good straight forward movie from when there was such a thing as British Cinema outside of film four movies. If you dont like it then there are plenty of other Hammer Horror movies that are bound to be to your liking instead.
This is the best occult film I have ever seen and is a very good screenplay of that great book by Dennis Wheatley.
The cast is outstanding, the music atmospheric, and the action is fast.
This is not a film to be missed and has no comparison to the blood-dripping drivel we get dished up to us nowadays.
A MUST SEE!
Its a shame that more of Wheatley's work isn't filmed. Its now considered bombastic and politically incorrect by self-appointed style-arbitrators and their baah-ing followers. But Wheatley knew his occultism, having hung out with illuminaries such as Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers and Rollo Amad. He excelled at telling rousing tales in which drama and pace are never sacrificed to cod-psychology or boring character motivation - the Jeffrey Archer of his day. Providing a heady mix of sex, violence and graphically described Satanic rituals and orgies, his work still resonates in the collective unconscious.
Chris Lee is perfect as the aristocratic Duc de Richelieu, Wheatley's self-confessed alter-ego - he was instrumental in persuading Hammer to film the book. But this movie is owned incontestably by Charles Gray as the Crowley-inspired Satanist Mocata - the impeccably dressed and perfectly mannered personification of urbane evil and predatory sexual menace. Gray's delivery is superb - 'I won't be back, but something will' is a killer line presented with distinction, heralding the onset of the movie's breathtaking core sequence in the pentacle.
Fisher's direction is pacy and rarely lets up, and there's a real atmosphere of dread throughout the film. The scene in the observatory has a hair-raising feel of inexplicable evil, and the appearance of the demon/incubus has a cold, creepy quality unmatched in any other movie.
The pentacle sequence is stunning and the breathtaking appearance the Angel of Death propels us into the type of mythic territory which is only now beginning to be explored by Peter Jackson in his LOTR trilogy. Lee's ritual to seal the pentacle, invoking the four Archangels, is straight out of the Golden Dawn and adds esoteric credibility.
Sure, some of the special effects are cheesy, and most of the other actors (apart from Tanith), are lacklustre. Yet the atmosphere and production values define this as Hammer at its very peak - matching The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy (all Fisher movies) in intensity, visceral imagination, commited performances and striking meditations on the nature of good and evil. The whole show went downhill from here, but what a swansong.
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