cult film freak: SHARON GURNEY WITH YVONNE MITCHELL IN 'CRUCIBLE OF HORROR'

Sharon Gurney in CRUCIBLE OF HORROR/THE CORPSE Year: 1971 Rating: ***1/2

It's been said that Viktors Ritelis was a British television director with the eye of a cinematic filmmaker, and his only feature, CRUCIBLE OF HORROR (originally THE CORPSE), is a creatively-shot thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock...

Helping to develop a wave of rural-set psychological horrors of the 1960's/1970's, from England's SHUTTERED ROOM to America's LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH to Hammer's DEMONS OF THE MIND...

Sharon Gurney and Yvonne Mitchell in CRUCIBLE OF HORROR with Simon Gough

Here initially taking place within a stuffy, stage-like manor owned by stock-broker Michael Gough, a subtle tyrant that Ritelis's use of eventual flashbacks provide the devil in detail... including mental abuse towards artistically-aged wife Yvonne Mitchell, and incest with gorgeous teenage daughter Sharon Gurney...

Who in real life would soon become Michael Gough's daughter-in-law, engaged to Simon Gough, playing her brother as equally cold and calculatingly conceited as dad: but CRUCIBLE, centered on the ultimate extreme of old school male chauvinism, is mainly about the females...

Sharon Gurney and Yvonne Mitchell in CRUCIBLE OF HORROR

The perfect pair of horror genre mind-game victims, who wind up murdering husband/father Gough resulting a slowburn proverbial chess-match of hauntingly surreal post-psychedelic hallucinations: either from within those stale stone walls or the gothically leafless, daymarish English exteriors...

Mainly providing the middle-aged Yvonne Mitchell a kind of reserved intensity perfectly suited to lead vulnerable young Sharon Gurney (resembling latter actresses Cynthia Gibb, Kelly Preston and Emma Watson) into a desperately last-ditch attempt at feminine freedom that (no thanks to a bizarre twist ending) might not be what it seems.