Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

Yesterday evening I listened to an episode of The Price of Fear on the radio. It's a series of one off half-hour horror plays for the radio from the 1970s hosted by Vincent Price. This week's story was called "The Family Album" and concerned a mild-mannered commuter whose wife is having an affair with his best friend. The wife and her boyfriend consider the commuter to be a timid joke, but he is secretly planning a macabre revenge.

Later on I watched an Arena documentary about the life and work of the famous poet T. S. Eliot, which was very interesting. After the show I must have fallen asleep on the sofa for awhile. When I woke up I saw a 1965 film on TV called Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, directed by Freddie Francis. The movie is made up of five different stories linked by a framing story, and it starts when five strangers (incuding Christopher Lee and a young Donald Sutherland) meet an elderly tarot card reader (played by Peter Cushing) on a train. The tarot card reader claims that he will tell each of the five how they will die and proceeds to tell each of them a series of stories involving werewolves, man-eating plants, voodoo curses, disembodied living hands and vampires. It was the first of a series of such films that were made in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Mostly it's neither scary nor gruesome although it is still fun.

This morning my Dad came to pick me up fairly early and take me over to my parent's house. The reason for that is because he is playing in the final of his golf club championships this afternoon. The latest issue of Sight and Sound magazine had arrived during the week. This month's main features including a report on the Cannes Film Festival, interviews with Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch and an article about the career of experimental film-maker Kenneth Anger. My Mum and I went along to Pizza Express where I had dough balls and garlic butter to start and a Four Seasons pizza (that's one where each quarter of the pizza has a differnet topping: one is plain cheese and tomato, another has anchovies and capers, a third has pepperoni and the fourth has mushrooms). It was really good. When I got back I watched a couple of episodes of Peep Show on DVD.