The story is fast moving and tries its best to confound the audience until the very last moment. The film delivers up front, opening with two local fishermen arriving on the island to discover the aftermath of a massacre. Already we are hit with several shocks, mutilation, murder, and frantic nudity.
A survivor is taken to a strange white room for a very unorthodox interrogation, involving regressive hypnosis induced by disco lights and injections of prescription drugs. This is presented as being okay if the police use them, but bad if you use non-prescription drugs and find your own disco lights.
An expedition sets out to discover the island’s secrets, to find the killer and look for some ancient gold. The team includes two couples involved in a love quadrangle (even more complex than the usual love triangle). They are in for a night of murder, mayhem, and sexual shenanigans. It’s like a dry run for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without the songs.
There are red herrings, bloodlettings, bouts of madness, explicit sex scenes, and the extended use of fast-cutting, with subliminal shocks, accompanied by a woman screaming. If you want to put an audience on edge, make them listen to screaming for a whole minute – it’s nerve-shredding. The subliminals interestingly flash forward as well as back, looking towards the spectacular climax.
As I've said, you have to take the rough with the smooth. The island and lighthouse are admittedly stage-bound, but they are still impressive sets. The boat that brings them to the island shows off back-projection at its worst, but as I’ve said, other effects prove to be more successful and mystifying.
The contemporary use of skin-tight flared jeans leave little to the imagination – and that’s just the men. The extended nude scenes show off both topless women as well as fit young men, a rarity in the genre. One of the actors, John Hamill, was also in the opening scene of Trog, which also starts off with an unusual half-naked hunk-fest. One nude sex scene is all the more explicit because of the lack of bedclothes, unlike a similar scene in the first Halloween.
Tower of Evil has an unusual cast for a British horror film. Many of the cast have done one or two horrors but none could be considered regulars. Jill Haworth (Haunted House of Horror, It!, The Mutations), and Bryant Haliday had brief stabs as horror icons (The Devil Doll and The Projected Man). Familiar support comes from Jack Watson as the boatman, who appeared as a vengeful ghost himself in From Beyond the Grave, but usually played stalwart police and army men. Dapper Anthony Valentine usually played villainous smoothies, here plays the interrogator – his other main horror role was in Hammer’s last horror To The Devil a Daughter, though he also proved how vicious he could be in Performance.
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