Cauldron of Blood (1968)

Edward Mann is credited as one of the writers for a favorite classic horror film, Island of Terror (1966.) His nine-film career went downhill from there. He not only co-wrote Cauldron of Blood (1968), but also “co-directed” it. I use quotation marks because, while I can find no information about the making of the movie, I’m under the impression that he took over from the Spanish director, Santos Alcocer, in an attempt to make sense out of it.

When I’m leading with this rather than the fact that Boris Karloff is in the film, you know I didn’t care for it. In fact, it took me three installments to get through its way-too-long 97-minute running time. Cauldron of Blood was made in 1967, but released in 1971 as the top half of a double bill with Crucible of Horror. While it was made in Spain, it should not be confused with the final films Karloff made in Mexico that were released about the same time.

There’s a kernel of a decent idea here. Karloff plays Franz Badulescu, a blind sculptor who unknowingly is building his art pieces over the skeletons of the people his wife, Tania (Viveca Lindofrs) is killing. For the time spent on this plot during the entire film, it could have been a 30-minute (including commercials) episode of Night Gallery. What we get in addition is the unexciting travelogue of Claude Marchand (top-billed Jean-Pierre Aumont), a photographer assigned to photograph Badulescu and his art.

Contributing heavily to my dislike was the fact that the transfer I watched on Tubi was awful. Cauldron of Blood has been released on DVD and Blu-ray, but I wonder if any effort was made to clean it up. If it looked and sounded better, I may have bumped my rating a bit. It’s hard to imagine, though, that anything less than a complete restoration and re-editing would do it any favors.

It was made close to the time of one of Karloff’s finest performances in Targets, so he was not as frail and decrepit as Cauldron of Blood makes him seem. I’m not as sad about the poor man hobbling across the floor with a cane, afraid that he might fall at any moment, as I am about the movie spending so much time watching him do it. This discussion is going to be short and to the point. Obviously, I can’t recommend it.