from contemporary reviews, "variety" wrote, "although pic has some appropriately menacing music and occasionally employs some decent special effects, the plot is too loaded with cliches, from the concept to individual bits of dialog to be taken seriously and not silly enough to be regarded as delightfully bad." charles champlin of the "los angeles times" wrote that the film "has some moments of effectiveness, but even the hard-line shiverists are likely to feel it's a long time between shrieks." tim pulleine of the "monthly film bulletin" called the film a "wholly unimaginative exercise in low-budget horror plunders "psycho" for its central plot gimmick in a fashion even more hamfisted than its is bare-faced." and that "nothing much is made of the potentially sinister import of the wax dummies, by comparison with whom the human performers also fail to come off too well"