Given the starry cast, one might reasonably expect that Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (known as The Crimson Cult in the US) would be a lot better than it is. Sewell, a veteran director whose career began in 1934 with the short The Medium, was never the most exciting of filmmakers and Curse, made at the tail end of his career, finds him at his most sluggish.

Richard Manning (Mark Eden), an antiques dealer, calls at Craxted Lodge at Greymarsh, the remote family home of the Morley family. He’s been led there by clues regarding his missing brother, who was last seen there. He arrives in the middle of one of those “wild” parties that middle-class, middle-aged writers and directors imagined that the young of the Swinging Sixties were attending every night (they weren’t) and is invited to stay by Eve Morley (Virginia Wetherell), whose uncle (Christopher Lee) owns the house. Manning is haunted by nightmares of a green-skinned witch, Morley’s ancestor Lavinia (Barbara Steele) whose history he learns from visiting occult expert Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff). His investigations reveal that Lavinia’s cult is still very much active, and that Marley is running it…

Although the author isn’t credits, claims are often made that former the screenplay by former Doctor Who (1963-1989) writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (they’d created the yetis for The Abominable Snowmen (1967), brought them back for The Web of Fear (1968) and then created The Dominators (1968) who no-one seemed all that keen on seeing again) for Curse of the Crimson Altar is based on the H.P. Lovecraft story Dreams in the Witch House. If it is, there’s precious little left of the original though the script was rewritten a number of times and possibly a lot of Lovecraft was lost along the way. There’s certainly a Lovecraftian feel to the story, but Stuart Gordon made a far better, if no more faithful, adaptation for the Masters of Horror television series in 2005.

Instead, Haisman and Lincoln try to fuse Gothic horror with their concerns about the young of the nation at the time, concerns that were all too often expressed in British horror films of the day. As so often, young people here are seen as licentious, nihilistic, and self-indulgent, throwing wild parties, yet it never has the courage to go very far in its depiction of all this wantonness. Scenes in the nightmares/flashbacks to Lavinia hint at a promise of S&M kinkiness but it’s just a tease and we never get there. Just a month before Curse of the Crimson Altar was released, producers Tigon British had Witchfinder General in cinemas which proved that, with a younger director at the helm, they knew exactly how to respond to the social changes sweeping through Britain at the time. Sewell, well into his late 60s by the time he made Curse of the Crimson Altar, would have been as out of touch as anyone else from his generation and the party scenes come across as, at best, a bit tentative, at worst, rather embarrassed.

No-one would have gone to see Curse of the Crimson Altar for the supporting cast which is just as well as they’re not really up to much. Mark Eden, later a regular on Coronation Street, makes for a very resistible hero with little charisma, Rupert Davies turns up for a day’s work as a vicar and poor Virginia Wetherall struggles with a role so thinly written it would have defeated anyone. But no, the real attractions were the three horror icons (four at a push), all of who are criminally ill-served. Steele doesn’t even get to interact with the others, just hanging around in dream sequences, painted green, and her voice conspicuously dubbed through a turned-up-to-11 reverb unit. Lee fairs better and was probably delighted to be working with Karloff again (they’d last worked together a decade earlier in Robert Day’s Corridors of Blood (1959)), though he’d injured his back on a flight home from Rio some weeks earlier and was still in a good deal of discomfort and is far from his usual form. Though not of the standing of the others, Michael Gough is on hand too in a truly thankless role, hamming it up shamelessly as an idiot butler.

It’s Karloff who comes closest to saving the day. When filming began on location at Grim’s Dyke House in Harrow Weald, Middlesex on 22 January 1968, he was just over a year from his death at the age of 81. He’s visibly frail here, confined to a wheelchair, but still on top form. Earlier in the film, as things start to get odd, Eden quips “Boris Karloff’s going to pop up” and when he does, the film sputters into a sort of life. His snippy patronising of Eden’s inability to appreciate his brandy is one of the few genuinely funny moments in the film. Unfortunately, the late-night shoots in a sodden and cold late English winter played havoc with Karloff’s health and contracted pneumonia. Already frail from emphysema, which had left him with only one half of a lung working, that and a subsequent bout of bronchitis would have done nothing to fend off his demise. It wouldn’t quite be his last film (his scenes for a quartet of Mexican horrors, La muerte viviente/Isle of the Snake People, Invasion siniestra/The Incredible Invasion, La camara del terror/Fear Chamber and Serenata macabre/House of Evil would be shot in Los Angeles during the spring of 1968) but it was a sad final film from the land of his birth.

Curse of the Crimson Altar is far from the worst film that Tigon would make (Zeta One (1969) would probably have top carry the can for that one) but it’s certainly not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. Making a dull film with a head-scratcher of a finale is one thing, but wasting so much talent is quite another. Lee, Karloff and Steele are the only reason to sit through it but even their most devoted of fans are likely to feel terribly let down by their treatment. In the UK, the film was released on a double bill with Elkan Allan’s “sexpose” Love in Our Time (1968) while across the pond it played with another Tigon horror, The Haunted House of Horror, also retitled, this time to Horror House.