The City of the Dead

City of the Dead is a somewhat subdued little spook show shocker wherein Christopher Lee holds forth as a professor of witchcraft studies or some damn thing, who gives a real detailed and evocative description of a witchcraft burning in a small New England town where there is always a thick layer of fog on the ground with fake tress thrusting upward toward a sky that is always dark. Okay?

Elizabeth Selwyn the Witch that gets crisped by the old-timey New England inhabitants of Whitewood (during the opening sequence, where we also get the de rigeur creepy Omen-esque choir chanting something that is either Pig Latin or just some gibberish they made up for the soundtrack record), pronounces a curse upon the inhabitants (good girl, go out with the middle finger firmly raised), and so the witches take over I take it for like three hundred years. One of Lee's students gets it into her pretty little Mary Tyler Moore head that it would be groovy, Dad, to go on down to that witchy burg and check things out all by her lonesome. Which is rather a bad move, altogether.

She drives in darkness (there is never any daylight for a minute of this picture) to the town, and rents a room in a house that doesn't actually exist run by a woman who looks as if she is the kinder, gentler, (but less charming) sister of Frau Blücher from Young Frankenstein. Before that she rents a haunted library book about witchcraft, which Christopher Lee has already assured us is "No joke!" No joke.

She examines a basement. Everything is sort of Dark Shadows-like. Damn it, I've got three hundred words left, and I don't want to give away the whole picture by telling you the rest, but really there's not much here I can go on and on about.

Some old priest or cleric does the "Ancient Mariner" bit, warning the girl away (or some girl, my memory is starting to slip, as I saw this picture yesterday and it's already mostly faded from my memory), but she fails to heed the warning and subsequently suffers much because of it. Finally, the boyfriend or somebody gets involved, and calling down to the perpetually darkened town, finds out that the rooming house "doesn't exist", and heads on down there to do some investigating of his own.

He pays for it. Big time. I really can't think of much else to say about this meager entry into the august annals of my cinematic sojourns (or whatever). Christopher Lee comes back at the end and is-- surprise! Not a bad dude after all.

A dude that gets stabbed carries a crucifix around, a big, gaudy thing in a graveyard that should be too heavy by about a hundred pounds, to catch some three-hundred-year-old village witches or whatever in its shadow (how the hell you can cast a shadow in this dark place is somewhat beyond my capability of reason), and then the thing ends. I can't remember exactly how.

I suppose if you're looking for an atmospheric, weird little film with not much going on, that doesn't make a lot of sense, and not an incredible lot to recommend it, except the presence of Christopher Lee, then, well, it's not long and reminds one of an old episode of Dark Shadows. Without the good.

Otherwise, there was so little here I've had to strain to pad this review out to six hundred words, and still, I have twenty to go. I think it's a conspiracy. I could almost swear it was witchcraft.

601.

Since I can't remember all the characters' names, I'll just give the cast as reported by Wikipedia, that unimpeachable internet resource:

Christopher Lee as Alan Driscoll, Dennis Lotis as Richard 'Dick' Barlow, Patricia Jessel as Elizabeth Selwyn / Mrs. Newless, Tom Naylor as Bill Maitland, Betta St. John as Patricia Russell, Venetia Stevenson as Nan Barlow, Valentine Dyall as Jethrow Keane, Ann Beach as Lottie - the mute housekeeper at Raven's Inn, who discreetly tries to work against the coven , Norman MacOwan as Reverend Russell - the blind pastor of Whitewood , Fred Johnson as The Elder , James Dyrenforth as Garage Attendant , Maxine Holden as Sue - Friend , William Abney as Policeman.

By the way, the film is also known as Horror Hotel. Punk rock horror legends The Misfits have a song about it.

Misfits - Horror Hotel (Live)