A Spoopy Month #13: The Terror

So what, you're asking yourself, is with all the Roger Corman movies? To be honest, it's just a coincidence. The Poe movies I watched last year were in the $5 bin. The Cormans I'm watching this year were too. Here's the next one, 1963's The Terror.



For all his business savvy, Corman wasn't the sharpest legal guy. He left copyright notices off a lot of his movies, which is why you can watch this and things like his original Little Shop Of Horrors for free, or even sell copies yourself.

This movie is kind of a mess. The script was hammered together by Jack Hill, who ten years later would be the king of a different type of exploitation movie (he directed Coffy and Foxy Brown), and Leo Gordon, who was much better known as a cowboy actor (that same year John Wayne famously punched him in McLintock!). The plot is needlessly complex and twisty (I must admit I kept being surprised by the ambitious plot), but the dialogue is frequently clunky.

It took five directors to film this mess, too, including Corman himself and Jack Nicholson and even one F. F. Coppola. Karloff only had three days to film all his scenes, and quite a few establishing shots reuse footage I saw in one of the Poe films last year. (I also feel like all the sets are leftovers from those films too.)

So here's the plot: Karloff, using his natural British accent, is a German baron hiding from the world in his rotting castle. Nicholson, using his own personal American accent, is an occupying French soldier during the Napoleonic era, who's been separated from his regiment. Karloff is being tormented by a terrible secret from his past, and a neighboring witch is trying to gaslight him into committing suicide, with the unwitting help of a hypnotized girl. (The girl is hypnotized with the same lamp Basil Rathbone used the previous year to hypnotize Vincent Price in the final third of Tales Of Terror, and I assume her gruesome end is achieved the same way as Price's dissolution in that film.) (Oh, and did I mention that the girl, who's presumably German but has an American accent, was Jack's real-life wife at the time?)

Jack Nicholson's character, showing characteristic American French bravery and nobility, tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, foil the witch's evil plans, save the baron, and make out with the girl. While each of his goals is temporarily achieved, he barely escapes with his life, and at the end of the film he's even lost his horse, and still hasn't met up with his regiment.

In the end, this film is long on "spooky" atmosphere and short on, well, most other things. I'm glad I've seen it, though, which I can't always say for these things. (I'm looking directly at you, Masque of the Red Death!)