Do I impress you as the kind of man who would play with dolls?
This week TCM Underground dug up an Amicus film from 1966 called The Psychopath, which was written by Robert Bloch and directed by Freddie Francis, so I paired it with another film the two of them collaborated on the following year, the horror anthology Torture Garden. But first, what about that Psychopath? Well, considering it's from the pen of the man who wrote Psycho, it probably won't surprise you to learn that it involves a boy and the invalid mother he feels he has to protect, but they're actually just two of the suspects when middle-aged men start turning up dead next to creepy little dolls bearing their likenesses.
The case turns out to be quite the head-scratcher for detective inspector Patrick Wymark, who not only suspects the boy (John Standing) and his wheelchair-bound mother (Margaret Johnston), the widow of a German industrialist who was accused of war crimes after World War II, but also three friends of the first victim (retiree Alexander Knox, embassy employee Thorley Walters, sculptor Robert Crewdson), Knox's daughter (Judy Huxtable), who happens to design dolls for a toy shop, and Huxtable's fiancé (Don Borisenko), an impoverished American medical student. One by one, the unseen killer picks off the men in various creative ways -- one is stalked through a junk yard by someone in black gloves carrying a noose, another gets the business end of a blow torch in the face -- but Bloch and Francis get just as much mileage out of filling the frame with the menagerie of dolls the clearly batty Johnston calls her "children." Even so, it might have been wise to rein in her performance a little. Whenever she's on the screen, no scenery is safe.
1967's Torture Garden also has a couple of unrepentant hams in the cast, but at least Burgess Meredith has something of an excuse since he plays the devilish Dr. Diabolo, who treats visitors to his sideshow attraction to a demonstration of the electric chair, then entices five of them into viewing his special exhibit, in which the figure of Atropos, the goddess of destiny, shows them their possible futures when they look into the Shears of Fate. As framing stories go, it gets the job done, and it affords Bloch and Francis the opportunity to spin four wildly disparate tales (the fifth customer, played by Michael Ripper, chickens out at the last minute), all of which are designed to illustrate the maxim that "there is no end to man's inhumanity to man."
In the first segment, Michael Bryant visits his ailing uncle (guest star Maurice Denham) looking for an advance on his inheritance and gets more than he bargained for. In the second, aspiring actress Beverly Adams worms her way into the latest film of leading man Robert Hutton, but finds the price of stardom to be rather dear. Next up is journalist Barbara Ewing, who unwisely tries to come between a concert pianist (John Standing) and his very possessive piano. That leaves top-billed Jack Palance as a wild-eyed Edgar Allan Poe fanatic interested in obtaining Peter Cushing's impressive collection of Poe memorabilia. The way Palance mugs his way through the role, you'd think the producers were paying him by the facial expression. If that were the case, I'd say they got their money's worth.