THE HAUNTED STRANGLER
The Karloff brand may have lost some of its ghoulish allure by the late ’50s, but it was still potent enough to bag him top billing on this vicious little British horror.
At first it feels like a bait-and-switch, exploiting the name without delivering the icon. Karloff gives a genteel, rather stagey performance as a novelist turned social reformer, out to prove the innocence of a man hanged for a killing spree 20 years earlier. The striking, coffin-worthy features immortalised in 1931’s Frankenstein have long gone. He looks like he belongs in a gentleman’s club, not some lightning-blasted lab.