cult film freak: CAROLE GRAY AND WILLIAM SYLVESTER IN 'DEVILS OF DARKNESS'

Carole Gray in DEVILS OF DARKNESS Year: 1965 Rating: ***

Before playing the benign bombshell in Planet Film's ISLAND OF TERROR, raven-haired/full-lipped beauty Carole Gray had a sensuously demonic/scene-stealing role in DEVILS OF DARKNESS that, shot by veteran crime-genre director Lance Comfort, is a hybrid of Hammer's DRACULA, Universal's THE WOLF MAN (with a harbinger gypsy woman), and the myriad of Satanic Occult Horrors that were gaining traction during the middle-to-late 1960's...

The first half being in Comfort's comfort zone with gentlemanly American-actor-in-England William Sylvester (later in Stanley Kubrick's 2001) and upper-class girlfriend Diana Decker (previously in Kubrick's LOLITA) figuring out that their idyllic vacation locale is really a demonic cult led by Hubert Noël's Count Sinistre, channeling Christopher Lee's neck-biter but more broodingly asexual and melancholy...

Painting of Tracy Reed in DEVILS OF DARKNESS

It's the second half when things almost pick up... as scene-stealer Carole Gray's vampire-moll Tania (sacrificed in the antique backstory and already resurrected into modern times) finds the perfect-girl sacrifice in redheaded model Tracy Reed, introduced much too late to become the kind of vulnerable ingenue the hero desperately needs to save...

From a potentially dangerous menace that (far too soon) winds up toast under bright lethal daylight — as these DEVILS OF DARKNESS anticlimactically peak before they can really begin.