A crippled thriller

Fear in the Night (1972)

Next film from the Hammer Collection continues on the psychological thriller path. This time a young teacher travels to the countryside with her husband to teach in a local boy school. She is however attacked by a one armed man before she leaves and that traumatizes her. Once they arrive to their new home things look great and life is beautiful, until she's attacked by the same one armed man again. Things start to look suspicious in the vacant school and the head master, played by Peter Cushing, happens to be missing an arm. I really loved the mood of this one and the strong cast carries the movie past the quite boring plot after the strong start and before the brilliant end third. I was surprised to see even traces of giallo style in this one, kind of like a mix of Hammer and Argento (the good Argento when he was still doing great movies). If the two thirds of the movie after the start would have been a bit more interesting, this would be one of the best Hammer movies. Now it's just a bit too uneven, but none the less it's surely worth watching if you're into Hammer movies. The picture quality of the DVD was fairly good. There's a commentary with director Jimmy Sangster and a trailer on the disc, no subtitles as usual.
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