Some movies ask you to suspend disbelief. Dark Places demands you exhume it from a shallow grave first.
Directed by Don Sharp, and boasting a cast that reads like a Hammer Horror reunion—Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Joan Collins, and Robert Hardy—Dark Places promises intrigue, madness, and Gothic chills. What it delivers instead is a muddled psychological horror that creaks under its own weight like a termite-infested stairwell. It’s not so much a thriller as it is a haunted waiting room.
The Plot (And We Use That Word Generously)
Robert Hardy plays Edward Foster, a man recently released from a mental institution who inherits the dilapidated estate of Andrew Marr, a man whose family drama clearly wasn’t resolved with counseling or medication. The house is rumored to contain hidden treasure—two suitcases filled with cash—and soon Foster finds himself the target of several amateur treasure hunters disguised as supporting characters.
These include Marr’s former physician, Dr. Ian Mandeville (Christopher Lee, presumably paying for a new roof), and his scheming sister Sarah (Joan Collins, before she fully weaponized her eyebrows). Also sniffing around is a solicitor played by Herbert Lom, because every haunted estate needs a solicitor with questionable motives.
Foster, meanwhile, begins to lose his already-fragile grip on reality, slipping into flashbacks of Andrew Marr’s troubled past. We witness ghostly reenactments of domestic implosion: a crumbling marriage, a jealous wife, homicidal children, a murderously indecisive husband, and finally, bodies bricked up in the wall like leftovers from an Edgar Allan Poe dinner party.
Foster, confusing himself for Marr (and the audience right along with him), begins killing people, because reasons. He strangles Sarah, pickaxes Mandeville, and lunges at Prescott before the police intervene, presumably after someone finally read the script and realized there were too many loose ends.
Characters (And Cardboard Cutouts)
Let’s be clear: Robert Hardy does what he can with the material, but he’s playing a man whose personality seems to have been checked at the door along with his sanity. He’s less a protagonist and more a shuttle for flashbacks, like an Uber driver for ghosts.
Christopher Lee brings gravitas to any role—but even his usual baritone menace can’t save lines that feel like they were written during a coffee break. Herbert Lom floats in and out of the film like he’s waiting for someone to offer him a better one. And Joan Collins, bless her, plays Sarah with the sultry menace of a woman rehearsing for Dynasty by way of Scooby-Doo.
The children in the flashbacks are meant to be unsettling, but they come off more like extras from a cereal commercial who wandered onto the wrong set. One is named Jessica, one is Francis, and both are inexplicably homicidal, which the film never really bothers to explain. But hey, they get bricked up behind a wall, so that’s something.
Direction and Atmosphere: Cobwebs Galore
Don Sharp shot the movie in a defunct asylum near Uxbridge, which probably had more ambiance than the script. According to reports, the place had water running down the walls and no heating. Fitting, because Dark Places is cold, damp, and structurally unsound in every sense.
Sharp does achieve one thing effectively: atmosphere. There’s gloom, decay, and plenty of fog, which helps distract from the fact that the movie takes nearly 45 minutes before anything resembling “horror” happens. But atmosphere without narrative drive is like a haunted house with no ghosts—just a lot of creaky furniture and visitors checking their watches.
Production Trivia (More Interesting Than the Film Itself)
It’s worth noting this film may have been made as a tax write-off. And if that’s true, it shows. According to Sharp, the producer was eccentric and no one really knew why the film was being made. That makes two of us.
Christopher Lee later referred to it as a “fascinating” and “clever” story, which is generous. It’s possible he was talking about a different cut. One with a coherent plot, perhaps.
Joan Collins, meanwhile, used this as one of several horror entries in her 1970s portfolio, though she later bemoaned her title as “Queen of the Horror Films.” If this is one of the jewels in that crown, it’s made of Styrofoam.
The Verdict: Buried for a Reason
Dark Places isn’t the worst horror film of the ’70s, but it’s certainly among the most forgettable. It’s not scary enough to qualify as horror, not smart enough to work as a psychological thriller, and not trashy enough to be fun. It’s the cinematic equivalent of inheriting a haunted mansion, only to find the ghosts are boring and the treasure is fake.
Even its murder sequences lack conviction, as if the film itself is apologizing for getting blood on the furniture. The final reveal—complete with bricked-up bodies and a descent into madness—should feel shocking. Instead, it just feels late.
Grade: D
Watch it if you’re a Christopher Lee completist or have a fetish for damp wallpaper. Otherwise, this one belongs in the basement with the rest of the forgotten corpses.
