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Fear and desire and the female gaze, a romantic tragedy. Medusa's sister Megaera, the last of the mythological furies in Mitteleuropa before the Great War, Bohemian painter and pregnant model are the latest victims of her deadly spree. (Petrification is her weapon, a corpse is concealed under hospital sheets until the gurney bumps into a table and a stony finger breaks off.) "Undoubtedly the result of violence" is the evasive prognosis of the physician (Peter Cushing), the artist's father (Michael Goodliffe) vows to clear his name against "a conspiracy of silence." Down he goes before the fiend, while his flesh turns gray he writes a letter to summon his other son (Richard Pasco) to continue the inquiry. The harridan wears scaly mascara and a crown of hissing tresses ("each snake a tentacle of the hellish brain"), the young seeker barely survives his brush with her by contemplating her reflection in pond water. "You look as if you have been in your grave and dug your way out." A refined Terence Fisher configuration of sex and death, at the center is the amnesiac nurse (Barbara Shelley) suspended between the glimmer of hopeful love and the glare of the full moon. The regime is a police state described as "democratic" by the police, a sense of masculine control extends from the main relationship to the madwoman tracked by a brutish orderly. "She had enough strength to spit in my face. And then she died." (Cushing has a fine moment of authoritarian jealousy questioning Shelley while coolly applying his scalpel to the cadaver just below the frame.) Christopher Lee channels his inner Perseus at the denouement, a Böcklin image concludes the vision of cursed beauty and calcified suitors. With Jack Watson, Patrick Troughton, Prudence Hyman, Toni Gilpin, and Jeremy Longhurst.
--- Fernando F. Croce |