After the success of "The Haunted Strangler", producer Robert Gordon made "Corridors of Blood", another movie with the elder statesman of horror actors, Boris Karloff, in the lead role.He plays a similar character here to the one he played in "Strangler", and has an almost identical character arc. In that film he was a social campaigner driven to clear the name of a long-executed criminal; in "Corridors of Blood", he plays a doctor attempting to discover the first anaesthetic after some of his patients lose their minds due to the pain they experience in surgery.Both roles for Karloff were good men led tragically astray. Here, the role is much more convincing; Karloff was a great actor whose most famous role as Frankenstein's monster didn't even scratch the surface of his talent. You can feel how much this character cares about his patients. He genuinely wants to help them and is surrounded by people who do not share his passion.If his colleagues had been more interested, perhaps Karloff's Doctor Bolton wouldn't have gone so far astray that he starts working for a gang of criminals led by the low-key, terrifying and creepy Christopher Lee. And perhaps he wouldn't have started experimenting on himself with gases, and becoming addicted.You see, "Corridors of Blood" is also a quasi-Jekkyl and Hyde type story, like "Haunted Strangler" was, though it stops short at getting Karloff to take his dentures out. The problem with the movie is that it stops short too much in general, like the filmmakers didn't have the heart to make a horror movie. The set-up is fantastic and could have been used to make a great historical drama. But its descent into horror fails to move us. The movie is also fantastically shot, so why do the scenes of horror make so little impact? It's like they didn't want to take the movie down that road, but had to.

An interesting film that blends a Jekyll & Hyde type of theme with a Burke & Hare body stealing plot, and ties them together with a medical plot involving the discovery of anesthesia. Boris Karloff stars as a respected surgeon in Victorian London who is committed to finding a way to perform surgery without inflicting pain on his patients. He develops a gas mixture that seems to work, but finds nobody in the medical establishment willing to believe him. He experiments with the formula on himself, and through a mixture of overwork and increasing addiction to the narcotic gas, wanders around London at night with no memory of what happened. He falls in with a criminal gang at an unsavory pub that want to use him to get fake death certificates for the bodies they sell to the hospital. A really classy horror outing that features one of the only pairings of Karloff and Christopher Lee (as the body snatching, murderer Resurrection Joe).

Karloff is great in this tale of a compassionate surgeon who is looking to relieve the pain and suffering that he inflicts through his life-saving surgery. In the process of developing an anesthetic, he becomes addicted to his formula and is used as a pawn of criminals.This is not a horror film at all but a good story about the historical problems facing surgery before anesthetic. There are murders for profit, there is the suggestion of painful bloody surgery but they do not really show it. There are no real disturbing scenes. This movie was billed as horror but most horror fans would probably object to this classification. It is, however, a good solid movie about a very real problem, surgery before anesthetic and a man who looked to find the secret to painless surgery.If you are looking for a horror movie, you wont find it here...but you will find a pretty good movie with the bonus of Christopher Lee as a ruthless criminal killer called Resurrection Joe.

Another from the Criterion Madmen and Monsters set. Here Boris Karloff is a doctor trying to find away to end pain during surgery. Regrettably he becomes addicted to his drugs and all sorts of havoc ensues.Better in many way than the co feature Haunted Strangler, this boasts a super performance from Christopher Lee. The problem is that this is tough going when viewed close to the Haunted Strangler since in some ways its more of the same (which isn't too far off since the films were made somewhat back to back). Watching them back to back, as one is prone to do with double feature sets I found my attention wandering, which is very unfair because this is a good movie.Heavily censored upon initial release this is a dark and cold film where everyone appears to be on the make or damaged in someway. (The cut material is included as an extra in the Criterion set; which also has an excellent commentary).I really do like the movie, I only wish I had watched it spaced days apart from its co feature not minutes.