The Blood Beast Terror (1967)

It's Peter Cushing versus the blood-sucking female moth monster in this weak Tigon effort which the great gentleman of British horror himself - rarely one to criticise anyone or anything in public - dismissed as his worst film. Made at the tail end of Vernon Sewell's career, he was far from his creative peak here, offering only plodding, uninspired direction to complement Peter Bryan's inane script.

Wanda Ventham was given the role of a lifetime here - a half-woman / half-moth hybrid who survives by draining the blood from young men - but the threadbare costume and the script's failure to actually get her to do much ruins any attempt to milk the character of any menace. Robert Flemyng signals his character's guilt in every scene he appears in, rendering him even less intimidating than his screen daughter, while Vanessa Howard just seems to be there to make up the numbers. Thank God then for Cushing, who may well have known all along that he was appearing in rubbish but still gave of his best; his usual compelling performance (did he ever give a bad turn?) is the only reason for watching this otherwise hopeless effort.

Sewell, nearing the end of his long career, makes a good fist of approximating the Hammer style, thanks in no small part to Wilfred Woods' budget-defying if cramped set design, but let's face it, he's no Freddie Francis, let alone a Terence Fisher. But he can never get past the fact that Bryan's script is a lazy conflation of scenes lifted from better films and nothing more and the forced humour is positively embarrassing. Add to this a reluctance on Bryan's part to explain quite why Ventham's character undergoes her transformation into the killer moth and you've got a preposterous, uninvolving piece that never convinces for a moment.
KEVIN LYONS