Tormented

It's been a couple of weeks since I did a post on a horror movie. To be honest, I tend not to watch quite so many horror movies as films in other genres. But one of my recent watches was the 1960 B horror film Tormented.

Richard Carlson plays Tom Stewart, who at the start of the movie looks like he's a lighthouse keeper on an otherwise deserted island. But in fact, there are other people on this island and Tom is just a composer and musician living elsewhere on the island and spending time at the abandoned lighthouse to get away from it all. Tom is engaged to be married, and coming up the steps of the lighthouse to visit him is Vi Mason (Juli Reding).

The only thing is, Vi isn't Tom's fiancée; that would be Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders). Vi is a former girlfriend of Tom's, and apparently serious enough that Vi thinks she can blackmail him, which frankly makes no sense to me since Tom is old enough that you'd think Meg would know Tom had other women in his past. At any rate, Vi and Tom get into a heated argument that results in their going all the way up to the top of the lighthouse where the light is. Since this is an old abandoned lighthouse, the railing up there is weak, and Vi breaks it, nearly falling off and having to hold on to the railing with one hand.

Tom decides he's going to do nothing, and lets Vi fall to her death! Vi didn't take the normal boat over from the mainland, so nobody is going to know she's here, and her body is going to wash out to sea, so nobody is going to find it. Tom's safe, except that he forgot about that pesky little Hollywood Production Code.

The next morning, Tom is walking along the beach, when he sees that Vi's body has washed ashore! Only, he goes closer, and realized what had clearly looked exactly like Vi's body turns out to have been a clump of seaweed. But then Meg's kid sister Sandy (Susan Gordon, daughter of the movie's director) finds a watch that Vi had given to Tom which was presumably going to be part of the blackmail attempt.

Further strange things start happening, notably involving Vi's disembodied head showing up to torment Tom, although of course nobody else can see it, much like the Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. More worrying is the presence of Nick (Joe Turkel). He's the owner of the small boat that Vi chartered to bring her over to the island, and when she hasn't returned back to the mainland, he knows something is up. He wants to blackmail Tom too.

It goes on like this for a little over an hour, being interesting enough and modestly entertaining, while never being anything particularly great. Not that the producers were trying to make anything that would come anywhere near greatness, of course. They did succeed, I think, in making something that's worth one watch with friends and a bowl of popcorn. It has a rather low rating on IMDb, but I bet that's because the movie was used for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Tormented has received multiple DVD releases, and I think at least one is available for purchase.