The spirit’s unwilling but the flesh is on show.

There’s something faintly desperate about Curse Of The Crimson Altar, a ghoulish enthusiasm to throw everything at the screen in the hope something will stick: blood, breasts, bondage, black magic… and Boris Karloff. It makes for a curious potion, one that both epitomises and underscores the opportunistic chutzpah of Tigon British Film Productions.

Often lumped in with Hammer and Amicus, Tigon never really had a distinctive identity beyond being, for better or worse, the third wheel of British horror. If Hammer had the lurid gothic, and Amicus had the anthology market sewn up, Tigon had… whoever was available. Founded by Tony Tenser, a former publicist with a sharp nose for sensationalism, Tigon existed on the periphery of prestige, constantly reaching for cult immortality with one hand while rifling through the exploitation bargain bin with the other. That they occasionally stumbled into greatness (Witchfinder General) only makes their lesser efforts, like Curse Of The Crimson Altar, feel even more threadbare by comparison.

A loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Dreams In The Witch House, the story sees antique dealer Robert Manning (Mark Eden) investigating his brother’s disappearance in the village of Greymarsh. There he finds a bizarre party in full swing at the country estate of Mr Morley (Christopher Lee), who lives with his seductive niece (Virginia Wetherell), a nervous butler, and a suspiciously convenient guest, Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff). Dreams, nightmares, and a few incongruous psychedelic orgies later, Manning finds himself entangled in a supernatural plot involving the spirit of Lavinia Morley (Barbara Steele), a witch burned at the stake who may be trying to return via a coven of enthusiastic cosplayers.

In truth, the film is a mess, trying to ride the wave of contemporary counterculture by chucking in a bit of modish psychedelia while still leaning heavily on the cobwebs of traditional gothic horror, a tonal clash which never quite resolves. One minute you’re being offered dry exposition over brandy and cigars, the next there’s a woman tied to an altar with green body paint and feathered headdress while Steele intones doom from a dream sequence that looks like it was directed by someone who saw The Magic Roundabout and thought it didn’t quite go far enough.

Christopher Lee, as always, does what he can with the material, lending his usual authority to a role that never quite cashes in on his sinister potential and at times its very clear the only reason he took the job at all was the chance to work with Karloff. Karloff himself, confined to a chair due to ill health, gamely wheels out some kindly gravitas, although his presence feels more like a macabre casting stunt than a narrative necessity and it would turn out to be the final film of his released during his lifetime, a sombre footnote to a storied career that deserved better material for its curtain call. Barbara Steele is criminally underused, relegated to the kind of dreamscape cameos that suggest its all the producers could afford rather than a genuine creative choice.

Beyond the stunt casting, though, the most on-brand thing about Tigon’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (also known as The Crimson Cult in the States) is how energetically the film ogles its female cast. While it never quite tips into outright sleaze, there’s an unmistakable leer to the way the camera lingers, and the dream sequences offer ample opportunity for bare flesh, theatrical writhing, and vague occult symbolism that mostly just serves as titillation, something Hammer themselves would lean into through the seventies.

It’s a film that typifies Tigon’s legacy: scrappy, derivative, and shamelessly opportunistic. But also, somehow, grimly entertaining in spite of itself; a spectral echo of better films made by bigger studios with better scripts, but without the cheeky chancers willing to put poor old Boris Karloff in a wicker wheelchair and call it horror history. There’s the odd pleasure to be had, particularly if you’re a devotee of the era or a completist of any of the marquee names involved but for all its flashes of ambition, Curse Of The Crimson Altar is ultimately a patchwork quilt of half-baked ideas and reheated tropes, draped over a skeletal plot with the thinnest of genre credentials.