Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, or as I like to call it, Dr. T’s House of Hoes, is a fairly standard British horror anthology featuring Brit ho mainstays Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (and a very young — yet still very creepy — Donald Sutherland). Cushing, sporting some of the worst fake eyebrows in cinematic history, is the so-called Dr. Terror (or Dr. Shreck), who frames the film by delivering tarot card readings to five fellow passengers aboard a train. (Really, it should be called Dr. Terror’s Caboose of Horrors.)
Each reading leads to a different tale of horror, and the third centers on the old horror standard, the voodoo curse. Roy Castle stars as Biff, a British jazz musician who gets a gig on a Caribbean island (I guess it’s supposed to be Haiti, but Biff’s manager seems to say “Pie-EE-tee”.), where he proceeds to be a stereotypical brash foreigner, flouting foreign customs and diminishing the local religion. Kenny Lynch plays a black calypso singer — in Haiti? — who warns Biff about messing with voodoo. Biff scoffs at him, though, and sneaks a peek at a local voodoo ceremony.
He falls in love with the music that’s playing, convinced that he can turn it into a hit back in the UK. However, he’s caught spying and is warned by the voodoo priest (Christopher Carlos) not to mess with the music. Biff agrees, returns home safe and sound, and lives happily ever after. No, wait, that would make for a shitty horror tale. Actually, he writes the music down and plays it in a club back home, incurring the wrath of the lamest voodoo curse ever. The voodoo god Dambala (Thomas Baptiste) “torments” him by blowing wind gusts at him, almost getting him hit by a car, and making him stumble over trash cans. The horror! Then, when Dambala finally shows up, he just grabs the sheet music and leaves. The end. Still pretty shitty, if you ask me. It’s sort of like a toned-down Curse of the Voodoo, with the curse winning.
