Producer/director William Castle was known for the gimmicks he put into his horror films. So when I saw the opening of Chamber of Horrors, I was expecting the end of the credits to have Castle as either the producer or the director, but in fact this isn't the case. Still, the movie is interesting enough to be worth watching.
The movie opens with a pre-credits warning that there are four scenes so intense that they're proceded by a flashing red light and a "horror horn" to allow people to look away. Of course, the four scenes aren't so scary; that's just one of the gimmicks of the film. After the credits we get a fun if bizarre scene of a man in Baltimore circa 1890 named Jason Cravette (Patrick O'Neal. He's getting married, but it's to a beautiful blonde corpse, with the minister conducting the ceremony doing so at gunpoint! So we already know at the start who the killer for the rest of the movie is and, thanks to the Production Code, we know he's going to get justice in the end, but there's a way to go.
Anthony Draco (Cesare Danova) runs a wax museum focusing on lurid crimes, together with Harold Blount (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and dwarf Señor Pepe. Jason's aunt approaches them, which is how they get involved in the case. Their sleuthing eventually reveals that Jason is hiding in a brothel run by Madame Corona (Marie Windsor), so the police raid the brothel and arrested by policeman Jim Albertson (Wayne Rogers), and put on trial by judge Randolph, with a Dr. Cobb testifying that Jason is perfectly sane. Jason is sent to prison and sentenced to hang.
All of this happens in the first third of the movie, so we know that Jason isn't going to hang, at least not yet. On his way to the prison, he's handcuffed to the police guard taking him to prison, except at one key point where the policeman puts the handcuff on one of those iron wheels used to couple and decouple cars. Jason, in a desperate attempt to escape, removes the wheel from the shaft and jumps off a bridge. But since he can't break the chain of the cuffs, he chops off his hand!
We then see Jason in New Orleans, sans hand but having contracted with someone who has made not only a nice prosthetic hook but a series of other prosthetic attachments that are going to get use. Jason goes to another brothel in New Orleans, and finds a pretty young lady named Marie (Laura Devon), who is willing to let herself be used in Jason's revenge scheme since Jason, having the family money, is rich enough to pay her well. That scheme, as you might imagine, is for Jason to use Marie to lure all the people who helped put him behind bars come to their own deaths. Of course, since there's that pesky Production Code, we know he won't quite succeed.
The ending of the movie is weird, as though things are being set up for a sequel. In fact, on looking up this movie, I discovered that Chamber of Horrors was originally conceived as a TV movie of the week-length pilot for a TV series that obviously never got produced. Supposedly the suits considered Chamber of Horrors too violent for episodic TV, so the material was released to theaters instead.
As for the material, I have to say that it's on the level of episodic TV of the 1960s, which means that the story isn't exactly great. It is, however, a heck of a lot of silly fun. And, of course, it's nowhere near as scary as the opening "warning" would try to get you to believe. Definitely worth a watch.
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