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"Pain and the knife are inseparable!" That's what incredulous colleagues keep telling Dr. Bolton (Boris Karloff), a respected surgeon who is determined to develop a successful anesthetic to bring pain-free surgery to 1840s England, when brutal amputation is a bloody and commonplace procedure. Bolton keeps testing his latest "inhalations" on himself, and his son's warnings against addiction remain unheeded. Before long, the tenacious doctor is hooked on his own elixir, barred from further practice and the drugs needed for research, and so desperate to prove the validity of his work that he agrees to a Faustian bargain: In exchange for the necessary chemicals, he signs bogus death certificates for local body-snatchers Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee), who earn cash by supplying medical schools with fresh cadavers. Robert Day (who also directed Karloff in The Haunted Strangler) handles this morbid plot with professional restraint, adding some routine hallucinatory interludes when Karloff's delirium results in a barrage of fevered visions. Otherwise this is a well-crafted but rather bland affair, noteworthy for its early display of blood (which is utterly tasteful by later standards) and also for giving Karloff one of his juicier roles, which the veteran horror icon tackles with admirable vigor and appropriate obsessiveness. On the strength of his early films for Hammer Studios, Christopher Lee was given prominent billing when this film (shot in 1958) was finally released in 1962, and while his eerie presence is keenly felt, his role is a relatively minor one. Still, this makes Corridors of Blood something of a milestone in the genre, signaling the passage of Karloff's era and the beginning of Lee's. --Jeff Shannon
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