The Haunted Strangler (1958, Robert Day) (Patreon)

57/100

Spoilers ahoy, though the film isn't really trying to hide its big mid-film reveal.

"Competence!" is my first note, by which I meant that this possesses the baseline virtues of a watchable movie, unlike Day's patently amateurish First Man Into Space (or The Atomic Submarine, part of the same Criterion box set). As anticipated, Boris Karloff plays no small part in that: At least 70 years old at the time of shooting, he manages to create a grotesque deviant personality without any makeup, simply by contorting his face—a startling tour de force that's only slightly undermined by how little rhyme or reason there is to the transformation. (Handling or at least seeing the murder scalpel ostensibly flips Rankin's Jekyll/Hyde switch, but when that's logistically inconvenient they just have him hallucinate it, Macbeth-style.) Unorthodox structure, too, strongly hinting throughout that Rankin's hunting himself and then letting him discover that horrible fact halfway through; the movie's strongest stretch sees him try in vain to get himself arrested (but not committed!), and it's easy to believe that e.g. his housekeeper didn't recognize him while he was physiognomically abnormal. I do wish that Rankin's emotional turmoil were, if not explored in more depth, at least given proper weight; like most British horror movies, The Haunted Strangler dares to be genuinely upsetting w/r/t who gets killed and how, and the relative ease with which Rankin handles having murdered his wife/savior just doesn't feel credible. I have no doubt that Karloff could do justice to that trauma. Day apparently just didn't ask him to, which causes the film to feel more gimmicky and less brutal. Still, after watching two flatly acted, ponderously expository sci-fi/horror hybrids from this era, it was sweet relief to enjoy some skilled professionals navigating a robustly creepy narrative.