
Up first a 1945 British horror movie called Dead Of Night. It's an Ealing Studio anthology film about a man arriving at a country house only to find he's been there in a dream. He tells the other guests about his dream and they discuss dreams, psychology and the supernatural in the framing story. Five of the guests tell their own stories in flashback scenes. There are 4 directors, Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, with Angus MacPhail and John Baines writing the screenplay. Basil Dearden directed the framing story, Mervyn Johns plays the visiting man, others in the cast I knew include Roland Culver, Sally Ann Howes, Miles Malleson and Googie Withers.

The Hearse Driver is directed by Basil Dearden and it's based on a 1906 story called The Bus-Conductor by E F Benson. A race car driver has a dream about a hearse driver calling to him, telling him that there's room for one more on his hearse. Awake, he sees the same hearse driver conducting a bus, he avoids the bus only to see it crash.

The Christmas Party is directed by Albert Cavalcanti and based on a story by Angus MacPhail. Right after this Angus penned the 1945 Hitchcock film Spellbound. He also penned some Will Hay movies. Sally Ann Howes tells the story of a ghostly encounter at a children's Christmas party. This story was cut from the original US release. What dicks distributors are, huh. Lucky for us it has been restored for the Kino Lorber Blu-ray.

The Haunted Mirror is directed by Richard Hamer and based on a story by John Baines. A woman buys a haunted mirror for her husband. He's almost destroyed by it but she saves him.

The Golfer's Story is directed by Charles Crichton and based on the H G Wells story The Story Of The Inexperienced Ghost. It stars Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, that's them above, playing characters much like their Charters and Caldicott characters from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Besides the three other films they appeared in as C & C, the actors played similar characters in several other films over the years. It's a bit of a silly tale about two golfers. When one loses a game, he drowns himself in the club's lake, he then comes back to haunt the other golfer. This story was also cut from the original US release but it too has been restored.

The Ventriloquist's Dummy is directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and the story was written by John Baines. Michael Redgrave is a ventriloquist who is as crazy as he seems in the picture above. Stories about ventriloquist dummies hardly ever end well and this one is no different.
I enjoyed the movie and was glad to have picked it up. The film looks pretty good, not great, there are a few flaws that weren't fixed in the 4K restoration, at least it's complete. I'm looking forward to the Tim Lucas commentary and the 75 minute documentary Remembering Dead Of Night.

Our second feature is the 1989 horror film The Dead Pit. Brett Leonard is the director, he wrote the screenplay with Gimel Everett. It's Brett's first film, he would go on to direct The Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity, Man-Thing and a handful more. I've seen all three but don't have copies of any of them.
An evil and murderous doctor is killed by his co-worker who them covers it all up by sealing up the pit filled with dead bodies in the basement. Twenty years later the co-worker is head of the mental hospital. A young woman comes to stay at there just as there's an earthquake. It releases the evil doc and he starts killing again. That poor young woman has no memory and a connection to the evil doc. She joins with another patient and the head doctor to kill the crazy old evil twat.
There's plenty of running about and murdering, nothing really original in the story, and I was glad to get to the end. I wouldn't need to get me a copy.