Three Dangerous Ladies

• Watchlist

Three unrelated horror shorts from U.K. horror anthology series, Classics Dark and Dangerous (1975), edited together into one horror movie anthology with three segments. Each story featured a woman who willingly or unwillingly spreads evil. In "Mrs. Amworth", an enigmatic eccentric elderly lady arrives at a small gloomy Sussex village to live in a mansion that was supposedly once owned by her ancestors. She becomes the life of the town by organizing wonderful parties that the villagers come to enjoy. However, strange vampire-like attacks begin occurring in the village around the same time. In "The Mannikin", Simone, a young singer on the rise, starts having strange back pain. Soon, a bizarre growth forms on her back. Terrified, she finds out that it's not a disease per se, but a Satanic curse tied to her late estranged mother and her servant, and that a horrible demonic creature called the "mannikin" is being reborn through her back. In "The Island", set during a war, Lieutenant George Simmonds takes leave from combat to visit his former lover Jenny Santander. She lives in a mansion on a secluded island. Everyone, including the ferryman, claim that the whole island is haunted and warn him not to go there. George, hardened by the real horrors of war, refuses to believe in old wives tales and heads there anyway.