Hallo-Watch: The Crimson Cult (1968)

Watched:  10/24/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vernon Sewell

The past few years I had seen a few stills of Barbara Steele in this movie, and it was enough to make me wonder what American International Pictures was up to with this one.  This movie exists with a few names, but I found it under the title The Crimson Cult (1968) on Amazon, but it also is known by The Curse of the Crimson Altar.   

And who wouldn't be curious about whatever is happening here?

it's a living

Our movie is about a very British alpha-male who is an antiques dealer whose brother sends him some items at his shop, where our lead is very handsy with his employee, when he learns his brother didn't return from a trip as planned.  He picks up and heads to an old mansion in a small town where he first comes across people reveling in the way of the swinging 60's that is supposed to look wild but looks like a room of people in need of an intervention.  

Upstairs, just chilling, he comes across Christopher Lee who is like "I've never heard of your brother.  But why not just stay here at the mansion with my hot niece and her drugs and booze?"  Our Hero does, which:  fair.

He meets a professor, played by Boris Karloff, who is the foremost authority on local history and seems to take their local witchery stuff very seriously, indeed.  And *hates* that Our Hero is unimpressed with his selection of brandy.

Our Hero goes to a sort of lo-fi pre-Wicker Man burning of an effigy that is part of a town's ritual around a witch.

Our Hero, while manhandling the niece occasionally, lazily looks for his brother, who he, 2/3rds of the way through the movie, recalls used a nom-de-voyage, and suddenly everyone remembers him.  Sigh.

The movie has some really fun bits.  All of the cult-dream sequences are just gold, and it's the only place we get to see Barbara Steele in her glory as the blue-tinted witch.  There's other general wackiness, secret passages, etc...  but the story just feels like it was a total afterthought.

It is Karloff's last movie, and he's clearly mentally 100% there, and physically declining.  Which, fair enough, he was born in 1887, so by 1968, he's not a kid.  And, in a twist, he is NOT evil in this movie.  He's just crotchety.  Which we don't know til the last 1/4th of the film.  

Anyway, the movie is *fine*.  But the highlight is 100% the cult sequences, which are just fun.  (This is not an endorsement of witchy cults, but it looks like a good Saturday night activity.)