Torture Garden Review (1967)

Digging deeper into the crypt we're going to pull out one of Amicus’s nastier little anthologies: Torture Garden. If Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors was the first trip on the cursed carousel, then Torture Garden is like the next spin when the gears are greased with blood, and the barks have grown a bit meaner. And at the center of it all, we’ve got another all-timer in the Horror pantheon, Burgess Meredith, smirking, sneering, and slinking his way through the role of Dr. Diablo.

The setup is pure Amicus magic: a group of strangers lured into a sinister carnival sideshow, each promised a glimpse into their destiny if they’re brave or foolish enough to face it. Instead of Peter Cushing’s calm, skeletal hand flipping tarot cards, this time it’s Meredith’s Diablo coaxing his victims toward the secrets of the Goddess Atropos and her shears of fate. Where Cushing played inevitability with icy grace, Meredith goes for theatrical devilry, and man, does it work. He’s sly and playful, yet you know every grin hides a trapdoor to Hell.

The stories themselves are a grab bag of macabre delights: a greedy nephew tangling with a cat that’s far more than it seems, a Hollywood starlet who’ll sell her soul for eternal fame, and even a Poe-obsessed tale that dips into the mad, rotting brilliance of Edgar Allan himself. They don’t all hit with the same force, but that’s the joy of Amicus anthologies, you never know what kind of twisted parable you’re going to get next.

What Torture Garden really nails is its atmosphere. The carnival framework is dripping with menace, and Meredith’s presence turns every line into a promise of doom dressed up like a joke. It feels darker, more cynical than Dr. Terror, with its moral lessons sharp enough to slice skin. And while Peter Cushing will always be my north star in these British Horror anthologies, I can’t deny that Meredith steals the show here in his own sly, devilish way.

By the time the curtain falls, Torture Garden leaves you with that deliciously nasty aftertaste Amicus did so well: fate is inescapable, greed is punishable, and every laugh the Devil gives you comes with a price. It might not reach the elegant heights of Cushing’s train ride into damnation, but as a follow-up carnival of Horror, its wicked fun, and Burgess Meredith makes sure you never forget whose garden you’ve wandered into.