Twins of Evil

A town in central Europe. Twin sisters Maria and Frieda come to their uncle Gustav after their parents die. Gustav heads a puritan brotherhood; he rides out at night and burns the women he accuses of witchcraft. In the castle near the town lives Count Karnstein, who really is engaged in dark business. Frieda goes to the castle. Maria does not. Their uncle cannot tell them apart. John Hough directs. Peter Cushing plays Gustav and Mary and Madeleine Collinson play the twins. It is the last film in Hammer's Karnstein trilogy; the source is Sheridan Le Fanu's story Carmilla, from which all three come. What is interesting is that it builds two threats. The puritan hunter is as dangerous as the vampire; Cushing's character is not a hero and the film shows him as a fanatic. Cushing made it shortly after his wife's death and had become physically very thin, which added to the harshness of the character. That the twins cannot be told apart is the engine; who is who is carried to the last section. It belongs to Hammer's late period, when the studio was trying to compete with more explicit violence and sex, and the film is pitched accordingly. Who it is for: viewers who like Hammer horror and seventies British gothic. Who it is not for: the presentation of the women belongs to its period and is troubling, the plot is conventional, and the horror is ineffective by present standards.