Peter Cushing reckoned this the worst film he ever made and it’s not hard to see why. Directed by old hand Vernon Sewell (Latin Quarter (1945), Ghost Ship (1952), House of Mystery (1961)) it’s a threadbare imitation of the Hammer style from Tony Tenser’s Tigon British, still several months away from better things in the shape of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968).
Cushing does what he can as Inspector Quennell, investigating a series of grisly murders, the male victims found mutilated and drained of blood. His plodding investigations (which involve at various points Vanessa Howard as his daughter, Glynn Edwards as his impressively mustachioed sidekick and Roy Hudd making his film debut as Smiler the irritating morgue attendant) eventually lead him to entomologist Professor Mallinger (Robert Flemyng) whose daughter Clare (Wanda Ventham) periodically transforms into a human-sized Deaths Head moth…
The Blood Beast Terror has the small distinction of being perhaps the world’s first and only were-moth movie but Sewell manages to make even that ludicrous premise seem dull and pedestrian. Constrained by a typically meagre Tigon budget he’s lumbered with terrible special effects and the cramped confines of Goldhawk Road Studios in London’s Shepherd’s Bush where he had to make do with tiny, not-terribly-convincing sets (Waterloo Station is represented by a brick wall, a lamp with “Waterloo LMSR” stencilled on it and a couple of porters). Peter Bryan’s script drops in loose threads that never really get tidied up (in the climax Mallinger suggests that somehow he “created” his lepidopterous daughter but no explanations as to how or why are forthcoming) and pads out the running time with meaningless asides like a terrible amateur stage production and having Quennell go off undercover in the latter stages of the film for no readily apparent reason.
Sewell does the already lacking script no favours with his plodding direction and it’s left to the cast to do what they can to save the day. Flemyng looks uncomfortable throughout (he later claimed to hate the film) and was in any case a late-in-the-day replacement for original star Basil Rathbone who died before filming commenced. Cushing has all the best scenes (especially the film’s only truly effective sequence, in which Quennell descends into the moth woman’s lair and discovers a subterranean charnel house littered with the remains of her previous victims) and is likely responsible for the idiosyncrasies that bring Quennell to life. Wanda Ventham is good value too as Clare, callously seducing prospective victims and turning on the charm to lure Quennell’s daughter to the hideaway she and her father have retreated to.
The plot echoes that of Hammer’s The Reptile (1966) released a couple of years earlier but isn’t a patch on John Gilling’s film. It wastes the talents of too many people, suffers at the hands of a tight-fisted producer and never succeeds in making its monster anything other than utterly laughable. Without Cushing, who gives it a lot more than it really deserves, it would have been unwatchable. He’d have more luck with his next horror, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), which found him on more familiar ground back at Hammer, Tigon would move on to Witchfinder General though Sewell would have no such luck with the wonderfully cast but tedious Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968).
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