Rent The Curse of the Wraydons (1946)

Widow Twankey Flips Her Wig - The Curse of the Wraydons review by Count Otto Black

This site's rating system is letting me down again! If two stars is almost good, and one star is barrel-scraping putridity, I ought to give this feeble effort one and a half stars for doing the best it can with minimal resources and just managing to drag itself over the finish-line. Tod Slaughter was already a veteran of the stage when in the early 1930s, at an age when most actors would be starting to slow down, he suddenly became Britain's most popular horror movie star, apart from the unsurpassable Karloff. Then Hitler happened, and by the time that was over, Slaughter's hammy histrionics, already old-fashioned a decade earlier but still daftly enjoyable, seemed as out of date as the ageing star himself. It wouldn't be long before Hammer changed everything and the public forgot all about poor old Tod. Looking at his late films such as this one, you can see why.

In case you're wondering, the Curse of the Wraydons is insanity. Every now and then a member of this thoroughly respectable English family develops socially unacceptable habits such as strangling women, and has to be discreetly locked up in a loony bin which, to be on the safe side, is so far away it's in France. Tod Slaughter plays a sinister and apparently nameless French spy with an English accent whose hobbies include strangling women, and who for some unexplained reason hates the Wraydons. Golly gosh, I think perhaps the film might just possibly be trying to set up a huge plot twist that's meant to surprise us!

There's a perfectly good historical horror melodrama in here somewhere struggling to get out, but sadly it can't, due mainly to the budget being almost non-existent. Adapted from a play, this movie might as well still be one, because theatrical techniques are used whenever cinematic methods would cost more. Why bother with flashbacks when you can get the same information across by having people talk about it? Not to mention the two characters who are supposed to have mysterious athletic superpowers but, since the budget doesn't run to luxuries like special effects or stunt-work, never actually use them.

In the end this threadbare film amounts to little more than a few people in fancy dress overacting badly at each other while they, and we, wait for something to happen. It does liven up a bit eventually, but the action is almost as sparse as the horror. If there's one thing Tod Slaughter could do, it was overact, and he doesn't disappoint, but there are long stretches he's not in at all, and when he struts his villainous stuff it's hopelessly obsolete even for 1946. In a couple of decades it would become fashionable again, but only for cartoon characters. He's not really credible as a live-action threat to anyone who isn't a Smurf, except in one brief scene, though even here his Bad Craziness is compromised by being filmed so artlessly it brings to mind those shots of Bela Lugosi walking towards the camera in "Plan 9 From Outer Space". I can imagine him in pantomime drag as a very convincing wicked stepmother, but it's hard to accept grown men quaking in terror of the tubby old creep, who at the time was over 60 and looks it.

I have a soft spot for this almost forgotten actor, who at his best really was so bad he was good. But this isn't his best, and mostly it's just plain bad, so unless you're the world's last surviving Tod Slaughter completist I'd give this one a miss. The films he made in the thirties were, apart from a few clunkers, far better showcases for his unique talent. And happily you can rent most of them here.