“Dreams are much more frightening, at least... mine are!”

There’s a lot to love in Vault Of Horror - possibly the archetypal portmanteau produced by the Amicus film company.

It has everything the connoisseur of this stuff could possibly want - wonderful 70s interiors, nasty people coming to sticky ends, odd decisions leading to odder consequences, and a shaky premise that somehow works, even if it does feel like the makers had to think up the ending on the fly.

We often talk about its stablemate From Beyond The Grave as being the one most influenced by 1940s original Dead Of Night, but perhaps this, with its recounting of recurring dreams and eternal-loop premise, is nearer to it as a whole.

Five men get into a lift from different floors, all barely engaging with each other as it makes its way down the shaft. They realise something is wrong - rather than stopping where it should, they’ve ended up in the sub-basement.

"But I pushed ground!" complains one. "So did I!" exclaims another.

They wander out into a room set with five chairs, and resigning themselves to a long wait, they start swapping tales of dreams they've recently had. "It's a strange situation, almost like a dream..." says Terry-Thomas, wistfully. "Dreams are much more frightening, at least... mine are!" says one of his companions, out of the blue. And so it begins...

Our first dreamer (Daniel Massey) has been hunting his missing sister, and has employed a private detective to find her. On hearing that she has been found, he celebrates by strangling the poor gumshoe (Mike Pratt, almost unrecognisable with flowing locks and impressive beard).

There’ an important lesson here for us all - on being asked “have you told anyone about this?”, the correct answer is ALWAYS “yes of course”, lest you want to end up on the wrong end of a throttling / stabbing / pick-a-nasty-fate. Especially, it appears, in Amicus films.

Rogers (for that is his name) travels to the village where his sister has been hiding. Bumping into a local, he’s immediately told not to linger after dark. The local restaurant won’t serve him, as evening is fast approaching. His detective warned him that the place was a bit strange, but Rogers is on a mission and brushes off any misgivings. Gaining entry to his sister’s house he wastes no time in bumping her off, too. There’s an inheritance to be had, and in Amicus films, that ALWAYS leads to murder (another rule for you there… if there’s a will around, don’t let your sibling in the house. Even if, as in this case, it’s your in-real-life sister, Anna Massey).

He’s ignored her warning that 17 people have died in the town recently, their bodies drained of blood - and when he leaves the scene of the crime, he notices that the restaurant IS still open for business and decides a slap-up meal is exactly what he needs to celebrate his good fortune.

Inside, he’s given a much more warm welcome than before - until he reacts badly to the house special (roast clots), and the curtains in front of the mirrors on the walls are pulled aside to reveal that he’s the only person in there with a reflection.

With his sister revealing she’s not actually quite dead yet, the vampires take advantage of the walking banquet in their midst, and Rogers is turned into a human wine box, tap in his neck, convulsing in agony as they drain him glass-by-glass.

"We all have a recurring dream," one of his companions tells him, turning to Terry-Thomas, "what's yours?"

The gap-toothed lothario wastes no time in discussing his own sordid tale. He plans to finally marry, with his eye on his friend's daughter. He wants someone to look after his neat home full of the beautiful things he’s collected during his long single life, and his betrothed, Eleanor, is penniless and desperate. Call me old-fashioned, but this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a hugely successful union. Despite their respective friends’ misgivings it isn’t long before Eleanor has moved into his groovy 70s pad.

But what the terminal neat-freak, with a “place for everything”, hadn’t reckoned on was that Eleanor would want to make changes. Her knickers are in the drawer where his y-fronts used to be, and she refuses to conform to his complex food shopping routine, leading to a spag bol disaster that leaves him pasta all reason.

A spectacular attack of the clumsies on Eleanor’s part finally pushes him too far, but as he rails against her inadequacies in the neatness stakes, what he’s failed to realise is she’s beyond breaking point too - and she’s got a hammer in her hand.

Now unhinged, Eleanor sets about tidying up and labelling her husband’s remains (including the disturbing “odds and ends”).

"There Arthur," she says, "you said I couldn't be neat, but I was, I tidied up everything. Everything in it's place and a place for everything..."

Two down, and we’re off to India for the third dream.

As a swami regails his audience with gory basket stabbing and sword swallowing antics, his act is ruined by our third dreamer, Sebastian (Curd Jurgens), who steps up and shows how it was all done. "No tricks..." he tells everyone. "As a fellow magician I can assure you of that!"

Even following the sister stabbing and head-cracking antics of the previous two stories, this seems spectacularly disingenuous on his part and marks him out as the biggest dick of the five storytellers… but there’s more to come.

Sebastian is in India on the lookout for new tricks for his own show. After watching a young girl perform a version of the Indian rope trick that even he can’t work out, he invite her back to his hotel. She won’t give up the trick, so he runs her through with a handy sword and sits down to work it out for himself.

Unfortunately, her assurances that the magic is in the rope itself go unheeded and after playing a tune on the girl’s pipe (not a euphemism) and seeing the rope leap from its basket, he sends his wife up it where she promptly disappears with a scream, leaving a spreading pool of blood on the ceiling.

The rope then turns on him, while outside in the street the crowds continue to flock to the swami’s simpler, and less fatal, tricks.

"It begins in a graveyard..." says our fourth dreamer. "In a grave... a freshly dug grave... my grave... buried alive!"

Our "hero" is horror story writer Maitland (Michael Craig), who is suffering cash flow problems ("there's no money in horror...") and works out a scheme with his friend (Edward Judd) to collect on his life insurance money.

Once again he shows an astonishing level of dickishness by mumbling that once he’s drugged himself almost dead, been dug up again and collected the cash, he won’t need his friend any more.

The drug works, and the body is found (whilst waiting to “die”, he reads the novelisation of Amicus’s previous film Tales From The Crypt). For some reason there’s no autopsy or embalming involved, and Maitland awakens in his buried coffin, the air fast running out - a situation not helped by his insistence on lighting matches every few seconds.

Meanwhile two hip young medical students (Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies from the sit com Doctor In The House) have decided they need to up their game by finding a dead body to practice on, so pay a handy gravedigger (Arthur Mullard) to find one.

This leads to a frenzied final act where a panicking and close to death Maitland is exhumed by the wrong people, everyone panics, road safety rules are ignored leading to carnage, no-one seems to care that a car has just spectacularly gone off the road and exploded, and the helpful gravedigger sorts out all the loose ends with his shovel.

As is said on-screen, it's a "preposterous story".

Finally we come to a tale of artistic genius, voodoo, more failure to obey the simplest of road safety measures, and a spectacular beard.

Moore (Tom Baker) is an artist working in Haiti and labouring under the misapprehension that he’s being unappreciated in his own time. He’s visited by a friend who tells him that he has been lied to, and his pictures are actually going for large sums back in London.

His artistic temperament well-and-truly fired up by this news, he buys some voodoo which gives him the power to destroy whatever he depicts on paper or canvas. If he destroys the picture, the original subject is destroyed too.

Clearly being the kind of chap who likes to live dangerously, he proceeds to draw the following - a vase (which breaks when he rips up the picture), a slice of bread (which is eaten by a rat when he rubs out a corner), portraits of the three men who wronged him (which makes sense) and a portrait of himself (which doesn’t).

Back in London, revenge is swift and brutal. Eyes are burned out with acid, hands are lopped off with paper-cutters, and brains are blown out - all using the time-honoured method of fiddling about with paintings. Realising he’s left a clue to his identity at the last killing, Moore rushes back there, but he’s reckoned without the power of voodoo - and the clumsiness of a sign painter and his large tin of paint stripper…

Back in the room, our five horrible people realise that the door to the lift has opened, but the lift isn’t there any more. Outside is a graveyard. Their graveyard. As they wander out into the mist, Sebastian tells us: “That’s how it is. And how it always will be. Night after night we have to retell the evil things we did when we were alive. Night after night, for all eternity…”

Vault Of Horror is in need of a major re-appraisal. The stories are sharp and nasty, and the deaths, although tame by modern standards, don’t hold back (in fact I’m sure any version I’d see previously must have been heavily cut). Okay, so the stories betray their comic strip roots (in every story there’s no way the killers would get away with what they were attempting, they would all be immediately arrested), but surely that’s the point?