It's 1880 London. The movie starts with director William Castle introducing this story of a ghoul or evil being who robs graves and feeds on corpses. Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a teacher doctor at the Queens College Hospital. He's in love with Maude (Audrey Dalton) but she was forbidden to marry such a lowly man. She married Baron Sardonicus (Guy Rolfe) and Krull (Oskar Homolka) is the baron's man servant. He receives a pleading letter from the baroness, and immediately goes to Gorslava in central Europe. There he finds the mysterious creepy baron with a face mask experimenting on the maid Anna with leeches. There's a locked room which the servants call 'The Chamber of Horrors'.This is a black and white B-horror. For what it is, this is quite watchable. The section where Baron Sardonicus recounts his story as Marek goes relatively slowly. The face is cheesy but I kind of like it. The mask is weirdly compelling. This old fashion horror isn't scary in the modern sense but it does have a good creepy factor. The story is interesting and compelling all the way til the end. The gimmick of the audience voting is just that, a gimmick. It's really only an afterthought in a pretty good old fashion horror.

If you like old horror movies, you should like this one. It has all the ingredients – creepy, remote castle with a torture chamber; a disfigured, mentally unstable villain; a loyal, if not so bright, henchman; a dab of debauchery; a damsel in distress; and a pure-hearted hero. The conceit here is that Baron Sardonicus's face is frozen into a hideous smile and he needs our good doctor to fix him or else his wife (who just happens to be the doctor's old flame) will get the disfigurement treatment herself. They were working with a low budget, but the acting is solid all around, the atmospherics are good, and the story moves quickly enough. I think it compares favorably to the other William Castle movies and the Corman/Poe series. Yes, Castle's appearances in the beginning and three minutes from the end (to conduct the "punishment poll"!) are tiresome, but just ignore them and enjoy the rest.

Mr. Sardonicus is really a classic vintage horror film of 1961, and a very cool plot to boot. The story of Sardonicus is a real spooky chiller with very good acting but I like to focus on the character Anna played by Lorna Hanson.A perky peasant woman maid who looks like you want to apply leeches to her but I don't favor her face I would like to the apply the leeches to Lorna Hanson's bare feet. I wonder what went thru the mind of Lorna Hanson when she accepted this part and decided to bare her feet for leeches and if she had a boyfriend or husband see the scene and what he thought watching Lorna's performance. Even my own wife Cathy shocked me after we watched Mr. Sardonicus together she remarked to me: "If they paid me enough as an actress I would have let Oskar Homulka place leeches on the soles and toes of MY bare feet as you and other men watched" I asked her if to her I was considered as "just another man" in the audience? She remarked "well...yeah". What is it with this woman? Maybe another man can tell me.

As sardonic as that statement is, it is entirely appropriate for this Gothic thriller about a mad baron, grave robbing, a curse and revenge, William Castle style. Without the Castle touch, it is a fairly entertaining formula grand guignole, equivalent to anything Vincent Price was making over at American International and that Hammer films was producing in England. In Castle hands (including the baron's moat around his own castle), the result is a grin-fest wider than the evil aristocrat's. He's a former peasant who through nefarious means (which have to be seen to be believed) and is married to the former girlfriend of the doctor he has treating him for his hideous disorder which is actually more charmatic than medical.The portly Oscar Homolka is the one-eyed valet to the baron who assists him with his torturous experiments (involving leeches) yet seems to secretly resent him for causing his partial blindness. When Castle comes on with the thumbs up or thumbs down cards for the Baron to get retribution (or not), you long to see him get the leeches or some other hideous torture, but the result is more "Fractured Fairy Tales" than Edgar Allan Poe. Still, there's a spooky enough early 20th Century atmosphere to please Gothic horror fans, and the result ends up being better than most of Castle's later films (the classic "Rosemary's Baby" and the spooky "The Night Walker" not included) but still only appropriate for the matinée crowd or drive-in theater customers who always expected schlock when they put those strange speaker devices on their car windows.