TORTURE GARDEN

BURGESS MEREDITH - "DOCTOR DIABOLO"


"Torture Garden" was a 1967 anthology horror movie with Burgess Meredith as "Doctor Diabolo".

The movie tells the tale of when five people visit a fairground sideshow run by showman Doctor Diabolo. Having shown them a handful of haunted house-style attractions, the Doctor promises them a genuinely scary experience if they will pay extra. Their curiosity gets the better of them, and the small crowd follows him behind a curtain, where they each view their fate through the shears of an effigy of the female deity Atropos.

The stories:
Enoch: A greedy playboy takes advantage of his dying uncle and falls under the spell of a man-eating cat
Terror Over Hollywood: A Hollywood starlet discovers her co-stars are androids
Voodoo: A jazz musician plagiarizes music from a voodoo ceremony
Mr. Steinway: A possessed Bechstein grand piano by the name of Euterpe becomes jealous of its owner's new lover and takes revenge
The Man Who Collected Poe: A Poe collector murders another collector over a collectable he refuses to show him, only to find it is Edgar Allan Poe himself.


BURGESS MEREDITH

From IMDB:
"One of the truly great and gifted performers of the century, who often suffered lesser roles, Burgess Meredith was born in 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was educated in Amherst College in Massachusetts, before joining Eva Le Gallienne's Student Repertory stage company in 1929. By 1934 he was a star on Broadway in 'Little 'Ol Boy', a part for which he tied with George M. Cohan as Best Performer of the Year.. He became a favorite of dramatist Maxwell Anderson, premiering on film in the playwright's Winterset (1936). Other Broadway appearances included 'The Barretts of Wimpole Street'. 'The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker', 'Candida', and 'Of Mice and Men. 'Meredith served in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, reaching the rank of captain. He continued in a variety of dramatic and comedic roles often repeating his stage roles on film until being named an unfriendly witness by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, whereupon studio work disappeared. His career picked up again, especially with television roles, in the 1960s, although younger audiences know him best for either the Rocky (1976) or Grumpy Old Men (1993) films. Meredith also did a large amount of commercial work, serving as the voice for Skippy Peanut Butter and United Air Lines, among others. He was also an ardent environmentalist who believed pollution one of the greatest tragedies of the time, and an opponent of the Vietnam War. Burgess Meredith died at age 89 of Alzheimer's disease and melanoma in his home in Malibu, California on September 9, 1997."

He was married to:
Kaja Sundsten (January 8, 1951 - September 9, 1997)
Paulette Goddard (May 21, 1944 - June 8, 1949)
Margaret Perry (January 10, 1936 - July 19, 1938)
Helen Derby Berrien (July 25, 1932 - August 20, 1935)


The following is a trailer for the movie:

"Torture Garden" - trailer from The Professor's Scary Clips on Vimeo.

LINKS


Internet Movie Data Base
"Torture Garden"

Wikipedia
"Torture Garden"

Internet Movie Data Base
"Burgess Meredith"


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