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Great Film overall

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is scarier then A Nightmare on elm street. Crimes at the dark house will make you go AHHHHHHHH! This is one of the scariest movies you will ever. see. It has great acting it also has a great story line. It you like horror stories you should see this movies.

Callous thief and murderer kills the real Sir Percival Glyde whose gone bush down under for more than a decade, then returns to England impersonating his victim to inherit the vast estate. With a litany of perjury to maintain, things soon begin to unravel for the "false" Sir Percival, as his lechery and lies quickly catch-up leading to ever more desperate and depraved crimes.Tod Slaughter is suitably nasty as the greedy deviant whose unsophisticated ruse barely adheres through a mutually beneficial alliance with crooked Doctor (Petrie) who catches on to the deceit early in the piece, then becomes complicit through escalating blackmail. The sheer abhorrence of the imposter's crimes is breathtaking for a film made in 1940, and he surely ranks as one of the most unconscionable villains of that decade (his dismissive immorality is right up there with Richard Widmark's giggling killer from "Kiss of Death"). His vulgar disposal of one of the victims in particular really is quite shocking when you consider the motive.Memorable dialogue ("double cross me and I'll feed your entrails to the pigs") and plot twists (the apparently illegitimate daughter who's a basket case, and just so happens to be a dobbleganger for Sir Percival's reluctant wife), keep the momentum constant, and combined with Slaughter's wicked characterisation, it's worth hanging in just to anticipate his comeuppance.

The Wilkie Collins novel "The Woman in White" has been made into several films, a TV miniseries, and a Broadway musical by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this 1940 version, it's pretty much the same story, but acted in a somewhat over the top manner by Tod Slaughter, who plays an impersonator of Sir Percival Glyde after he kills the real Glyde.Even though it's a short film, this movie seemed endless as Glyde gleefully kills anyone who stands in the way of the money from his alliance with Laurie Fairlie.The rest of the acting is okay; Hay Petrie plays Isidore Fosco, and he's a small man, nothing at all like Sydney Greenstreet. Not having read the original novel, I don't know how much this veers from it, but it definitely veers from other versions.If the entire film had been done in a tongue in cheek manner, it would have been one thing, but everyone played it straight except Slaughter.

This movie is pretty darn delightful, right from the first scene where Mr. Tod Slaughter is seen hammering a spike into an unsuspectingly asleep man's head! He then impersonates the man, gaining admittance into the man's estate that had just been willed to him. You get to hear Tod say, "I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!"!! Don't pass up a chance to see it.