Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

Five passengers share a train compartment with a sixth man. He introduces himself as Doctor Schreck, produces a deck of cards and reads each of their futures, and the film breaks into five short stories: a werewolf, a creeping vine taking over a house, a musician who steals a voodoo rhythm, a severed hand pursuing its owner, and a vampire. This is the first substantial example of the portmanteau horror format that the Amicus studio would go on to use again and again. Freddie Francis directed. Peter Cushing plays the fortune teller and Christopher Lee a supremely pleased art critic, and that segment is the best of the five because it holds comedy and dread at once. A young Donald Sutherland turns up in the cast. Its flaw is the standard one for anthologies. The quality swings hard between episodes, the voodoo story is both weak and uncomfortable now, and the closing twist is guessable from the first minute. Who it is for: lovers of 1960s British horror and short story collections. Who it is not for: anyone who actually wants to be frightened.