Horrors of the Black Museum

If you suffer from a bad case of hiccups, head over to the Brattle this week. Yes, gentle folk, it's Horror Time at your local art theatre. Horrors of the Black Museum, the first of the spine-tinglers, will be followed Wednesday by Blood of the Vampire. For the weekend ghoul, there's Horror of Dracula.

The current fare has everything: Cinemascope, Hypno Vista, a little terror, a little sex, and more laughs than the writer intended. Following a rollicking travelogue through Poland comes a sales pitch on hypnotism by a man we are assured is an eminent Hollywood psychiatrist. The movie we are about to see, he promises us, is a real tiger; within five minutes we're going to be scared silly.

After a few samples of the wonders of hypnotism we are ready for the feature. "Imagine yourself in London," intones the kindly doctor. "You are in London, you are in London, you are in London...."

In fact, we're standing in the middle of a London street with cars whizzing past.

Now Horrors of the Black Museum is in full swing. And from all the prop rooms of all the studios comes the full stock of exotic murder weapons. First a beautiful young woman with blue eyes and decolletage receives a pair of binoculars as an anonymous gift. Her roommate (brown eyes and decolletage) reports the murder promptly.

Next comes a guillotine murder, followed in rapid succession by an icepick murder, an electrocution, and in the finale, two knifings. As the audience learns early in the show and suspects even earlier, the man responsible for all this mayhem is a crime reporter and biographer who, with an admirable collector's instinct, is creating his own Black Museum to surpass that of Scotland Yard.

But as the murderer is chased from the tunel of love, through the fun house and the house of mirrors, through the crowd and to the ferris wheel, one thinks for just a brief moment that perhaps he has seen it all before and wonders why he ever bothered. By this time, however, the villain is climbing the ferris wheel, sirens are sounding, women are screaming, and at such a moment, who can doubt?

No outer-space visitors, no insect mutations, nothing from the black lagoon, just a plain old-fashioned maniac. I was too scared even to remember his name.