Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

blanche-2 The Wilkie Collins novel "The Woman in White" has been made into several films, a TV miniseries, and a Broadway musical by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this 1940 version, it's pretty much the same story, but acted in a somewhat over the top manner by Tod Slaughter, who plays an impersonator of Sir Percival Glyde after he kills the real Glyde.Even though it's a short film, this movie seemed endless as Glyde gleefully kills anyone who stands in the way of the money from his alliance with Laurie Fairlie.The rest of the acting is okay; Hay Petrie plays Isidore Fosco, and he's a small man, nothing at all like Sydney Greenstreet. Not having read the original novel, I don't know how much this veers from it, but it definitely veers from other versions.If the entire film had been done in a tongue in cheek manner, it would have been one thing, but everyone played it straight except Slaughter.

BaronBl00d The Woman in White, a great novel penned by Wilkie Collins, serves as the backbone for this Reader's Digest version of the novel adapted by Edward Dryhurst and produced/directed by Tod Slaughter regular George King. Slaughter also served as a producer, and this films has higher production values than most of Slaughter/King's previous efforts. While I enjoy the movie vastly, I am hesitant to call it the best of Slaughter's work. Give me The Face at the Window or even better Murder in the Red Barn where Slaughter leers more in one movie than twelve men could in twelve movies! Notwithstanding that this film is quite good as Slaughter opens the film drilling a nail/spike into a sleeping man's head in the Australian outback and assumes his identity going to England as the new lord of the manor. Slaughter immediately takes note of the young blonde maid who he raise up to chambermaid. With Slaughter's eyes rolling, his heavy-handed gesturing, and his tone and inflection, you know exactly what his intentions are at every moment. I know of no other actor who acts this way and could get away with acting this way. Slaughter does it so effortlessly, and let's be honest - if you are watching this film it is more than likely to see him. He is larger than life. The thickest slice of ham I have ever seen in films. The adaptation of Collin's novel has many shortcomings but stays surprisingly faithful to the main parts. The direction of King is adequate and the other performers are really rather good. Slaughter dispatches of people with glee and has some wonderful scenes with Hay Petrie as Isidor Fosco - a scoundrel of a different stripe so to say. Leering, drowning, hackling maniacally all are part of the Tod Slaughter package here. If you still have not seen one of his films, this one is as good as any to begin seeing what all the fuss - deserved and still not completed in any way - is about regarding Tod Slaughter.

JohnHowardReid Crimes at the Dark House (1940) was adapted from the famous Wilkie Collins novel, The Woman in White. Warner Bros made an outstanding (and far more faithful) version, directed by Peter Godfrey in 1948, with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker and Sydney Greenstreet (which is not at present available on commercial DVD). This one was obviously filmed on the cheap. Nonetheless, despite Slaughter's fulsome melodramatics, it has its suspenseful and even horrific moments, plus a delightful interpretation (the extreme opposite of Greenstreet's) of Fosco by diminutive Hay Petrie. Geoffrey Wardwell (in his last of six movies) is a dead loss as the hero, but Sylvia Marriott manages her dual role quite ably. Stage actress Hilary Eaves also makes a considerable impression in one of her rare movies (she made only three), while Rita Grant is an absolute stand-out as the maid of no account.

Terrell-4 Think of a cross between Alan Mowbray and John Barrymore in his last, eyebrow-wagging years and you might have some idea of Tod Slaughter. He was a large, fleshy man with, when he lowered his head, a magnificent double chin. Not a man to hide his hamminess under a cloak of talent, he brought delight to evil with lip-smacking relish in any number of British movies and stage plays. As the false Sir Percival Glyde in Crimes at the Dark House, he brings to mustache-fingering and lascivious chuckling a kind of lovable, horrid fascination. We learn the kind of role Slaughter was noted for when, at the start of Crimes at the Dark House, in the year 1850, he uses a mallet to drive a chisel into the neck of the real Sir Percival, all the while snickering with pleasure. The movie is based, sort of, on Wilkie Collins' grand old Victorian melodrama, The Woman in White. It races by in just 69 minutes, far too fast for us to be bored. Is the movie as bad as some of the acting? Not at all. In fact, like the book, it's quite a page turner, complete with lethal stratagems, a mad woman roaming the grounds of a lonely mansion, one hidden marriage and an unwelcome one, strangled women and cold cells in an insane asylum. Of course, there is love as well as death, and cleansing retribution comes in the engulfing flames of, what else, a family church. Above all, there is the great, hammy performance of Tod Slaughter. He chisels to death the real Sir Percival Glyde in the Australian outback, then assumes Sir Percival's identity when he returns to England to his victim's' ancestral home, Blackwater Park. He expects to find an inheritance of great wealth. Instead he finds nothing but mortgages and debt. Ah, but then he learns Sir Percival and the lovely Laura Fairlie long ago had been pledged to marriage...and Laura will have her own riches when she marries. He also learns that Sir Percival may have married a woman before he left years earlier for Australia, a woman who bore a daughter...a daughter who now is mad and confined to an insane asylum...an insane asylum run by the unctuous and unprincipled Dr. Fosco...the same Dr. Fosco who...you get the idea. Laura Fairlie hates the idea of marriage to this portly, maid-groping, leering degenerate. She has discovered real love with her art tutor, a young man with impeccable upper-class enunciation. Yet she does what her guardian and propriety insist. She weds the false Sir Percival and, with her sister Marion, comes to live at Blackwater. It's not long before the mad girl escapes, Sir Percival and Fosco plan a cruel deception, and Sir Percival chortles his way through three more murders. If this sounds like lip-smacking Victorian melodrama, it is. And it's not bad for, as some critics like to say about popular melodrama, what it is. Crimes at the Dark House is a Tod Slaughter potboiler, but my favorite in the cast is Hay Petrie as Dr. Fosco. He was a very short man and a versatile actor who caught Michael Powell's attention. Petrie played small but notable parts in the Powell/Pressburger movies Contraband, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. He could give a pungent, memorable performance when it was called for. Just watch him in One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Contraband and A Canterbury Tale - Criterion Collection. If you're interested in just how good a Victorian melodrama The Woman in White can be when adapted with style, you need to watch the fine, multi-part BBC production from 1997. Marion Fairlie is our narrator, and she takes us into a more restrained but just as dangerous, moody and threatening a world. You'll be impressed, I hope, with Marion's (Tara Fitzgerald) bravery and resourcefulness; you'll sigh along with Laura Fairlie's (Justine Waddell) fears and hopes; be impressed with her tutor's (Andrew Lincoln) steadfast love; loathe Sir Percival's (James Wilby) ruthless caddishness; be fascinated by Count Fosco's (Simon Callow) cruel stratagems and be captivated by the hypochondria of the Fairlie sisters' scene-stealing guardian (Ian Richardson).