Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day) (Patreon)

50/100

Very odd, though ultimately not in a satisfying way. The title implies a horror film, but this is really an addiction drama crossed with a (completely fictional) great-man biopic, as Boris Karloff's 19th-century doc gradually destroys himself while attempting to invent anesthesia. Noble and pathetic makes for a curious combination, and Karloff never quite finds the balance; Bolton just sort of enters an ill-defined mental fog while under the influence of his still-experimental formula, perhaps becoming a bit more pliable than usual (and then not remembering anything he did in that state). There are villains, in the form of an alehouse crew who commit murders and sell the bodies to hospitals, but coercing a doctor into signing a false death certificate doesn't exactly make the spine tingle, and Christopher Lee gets disappointingly little to do as a character by the promising name of Resurrection Joe. (He should by rights be called Suffocation Joe, his modus operandi being to smother drunks with a pillow, but even that aspect's fairly blah.) Ultimately, Corridors of Blood wants to lionize its protagonist for his stubborn dedication to divorcing pain from surgery while simultaneously pitying him for becoming a huffin' junkie exploited by baddies, and I'm not sure that needle could ever have been successfully threaded. And when the time comes for Bolton to amputate a cute little girl's infected foot, still without a functional anesthetic, the movie totally chickens out, though maybe that's for the best. In any case, if you can only find the time and/or will to watch one 1958 horror-adjacent film directed by Robert Day and starring Boris Karloff, go with The Haunted Strangler.