Having made a name for himself with a string of youth oriented horror films in his native America (I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Blood of Dracula (1957), How to Make a Monster (1957)), Herman Cohen took note of the early success of Hammer Films and quickly set up shop in the UK, making a decent gamble on it becoming the centre for horror production in the coming years. He arrived in 1958 and signed up Michael Gough (also in that year’s Hammer version of Dracula) to star in Horrors of the Black Museum (1959). He stayed in the UK, on and off, for over a decade producing another string of genre films (The Headless Ghost (1959), Konga (1961), A Study in Terror (1965) – Black Zoo (1963) was shot back in the States but with a British lead, Gough, who quickly became the producer’s Englishman of choice) before finally bringing Joan Crawford over to the UK for the circus-set Berserk.

Crawford had enjoyed a latter-day success with Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and it was no doubt this which inspired Cohen to lure the fading star to the UK for her penultimate big screen appearance – he’d make one more film with her in blighty, the revived caveman film Trog in 1970. Cohen wrote the script, with regular writing partner Aben Kandel specifically with Crawford in mind. She turns out to be one of the few highlights in an otherwise very dull film.

Crawford plays Monica Rivers who co-owns a circus with Dorando (Gough) that is travelling the UK and doing pretty well for itself. The death of tightrope walker Gaspar the Great (Thomas Cimarro), strangled when his tightrope breaks, threatens the run of good luck, particularly when it turns out that the rope might have deliberately tampered with. Dorando is alarmed when Monica wants to use the death for publicity purposes, but she’s distracted by the arrival of new tightrope act, the handsome Frank Hawkins (Ty Hardin). Dorando is found murdered, a metal spike rammed through his head, and he’s just the first of several more inexplicable deaths (“this circus is jinxed – it’s becoming a nightmare!”). To add to Monica’s woes, her daughter Angela (Judy Geeson) has been expelled from school and has turned up at the circus trailing a whole load of psychological baggage behind her…

The circus setting may have been inspired in equal parts by the availability of a real-life big top supplied by Billy Smart and the success of Sidney Hayers’ Circus of Horrors (1960) with which it shares many other similarities (they were both shot at Smart’s circus). Berserk is also not dissimilar to The Shadow (1937), also about a killer stalking a circus. So originality was never going to be much of an issue. Unfortunately, beyond the dimming star power of Crawford, it has precious little else going for it. Smart allowed the use of his circus but insisted that as many of his performers be crammed into the film as possible, so director Jim O’Connolly, en route to The Valley of Gwangi (1969) and Tower of Evil (1972) via Crooks and Coronets (1969), was obliged to pad the film with all manner of animal acts, from parading elephants to “intelligent poodles.” Fine if circuses are your thing but if you spent your childhood studiously dodging Billy Smart and co every time they appeared on British television (and in the 60s and 70s, they were on a lot) this is going to be hard work.

It means that after Dorando has been murdered, an already slow-moving film pretty much comes to a halt as we watch dreary circus acts (which just cry out for judicious use of the fast forward button) and listen to drearier declarations of lust between Monica and Hawkins. Along the way, Diana Dors turns up as a bitchy assistant to knife-thrower Philip Madoc, getting an early death-by-power-tool scene and probably wandering whatever happened to that 50s sex symbol once hailed (by herself admittedly) as “the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva”; Robert Hardy skulks around the edges of the action as a persistent but mostly useless cop; and we’re regaled by a bizarre song and dance routine from the circus’ sideshow performers (among them Milton Reid, George Claydon, Golda Casimir and Ted Lune).

O’Connolly tries to reproduce the formula that had made Horrors of the Black Museum a hit, stringing a series of gruesome (for their time) murders along a not terribly engaging mystery. But it’s an even more uneven film than its predecessor, getting far too easily bogged down in all the business about Monica’s fractious relationship with her daughter – Cohen had wanted to cast Crawford’s real life daughter Christina but the star vetoed the idea. Had it happened, it might have cast a very different light on Christina’s 1978 memoir Mommie Dearest which detailed the real life abuse she suffered at the mother’s hands. The film culminates in a poorly handled revelation of who the real killer is (it doesn’t make a great deal of sense and their motivation feels like it was made up on the spot) leading to a laughable final scene where they attempt to flee and are conveniently struck by lightning.

Berserk (only the posters and the trailer carry an “!” after the title – on the film itself there’s no such punctuation) is of interest only for its impressive cast. The story is of little consequence, the murders not as shocking as those in Horrors of the Black Museum and the pacing at best erratic, at worst glacial. O’Connolly had much better luck later – Tower of Evil may be very silly, but it’s a lot more fun than the stodgy Berserk – but Cohen was coming close to chucking it all in. After producing O’Connolly’s comedy crime caper Crooks and Coronets (which Crawford was originally slated to star in though she pulled out of the project) and overseeing the English language version of Sergio Garrone’s spaghetti western Django il bastardo (1969), he helped drag British horror down to new lows with Trog and Craze (1974) before finally – mercifully – calling it a day.