Although this is certainly not one of their more famous titles, I was actually quite impressed with this Hammer movie which is an interesting variation on the famous French thriller "Diabolique" but with four main characters instead of three. Judy Geeson is a naive schoolmarm who marries a man (Ralph Bates) who she thinks is also a schoolteacher but actually turns out to be the caretaker of an abandoned boys' school and its mentally unstable former headmaster (Peter Cushing). The headmaster in turn has a shrewish, grasping wife (Joan Collins)who spends her time cruelly blasting cute bunnies with a double-barreled shotgun. Without giving too much of the plot away, two of the characters are having an affair and scheme to drive another of the characters insane so he/she will kill the fourth character. But as usually happens, the plan goes horribly awry for almost everyone involved.
This is one of the more interesting 70's Hammer films because it actually tries to do something new rather than just mining the old Gothic formulas and monsters that served them so well in the 60's. Hammer had of course done psychological thrillers like this as early as "Scream of Fear" in 1961, but this is one kind of film that they actually refined and perfected in the 1970's (rather than beat like dead horse)with entries like this, "Straight on Until Morning", and the Gothic/psycho-thriller "Demons of the Mind". It was definitely better than Jimmy Sangster's first directorial effort "Lust for a Vampire", even though the latter was much more famous (probably owing to Yutte Stensgaard pulling her two Danishes out every five minutes). It will probably never be regarded as a Hammer classic, but is interesting film at least, which is more than can be said of a lot of their 70's product
