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Director: Roger Corman (with Francis
Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson)
Screenplay: Leo Gordon and Jack
Hill
Cast: Boris Karloff (as the Baron
von Leppe); Jack Nicholson (as Andre Duvalier); Dick Miller (as Stefan); Sandra
Knight (as Helene); Dorothy Neumann (as Katrina); Jonathan Haze (as Gustaf)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #51
Not all Roger Corman films are created equal, and in the period of his
legendary Edgar Allen Poe films The Terror was spawned from still
having Boris Karloff after The Raven
(1963) and deciding to take advantage of resources he already had from the Poe
films he'd already made. Surprisingly, despite the ridiculous and illustrious
list of people meant to have directed parts of the film unofficially with him, it's
a surprisingly coherent and curiously woozy supernatural chiller, but the real
issue is how undercooked in parts it is against the moments which do succeed
completely. Jack Nicholson is a very
unconventional choice for a French soldier, Andre Duvalier, who has lost his
way from his regiment and into countryside where the alluring and mysterious
woman Helene (Sandra Knight) is. Her existence,
denied as merely his hallucinations, leads to the castle of Baron von Leppe (Karloff), an elderly lord who claims the
woman is his long dead wife, causing Andre to try to get to the bottom of who
is right.
Even if it suffers from being in
the public domain, and lacklustre versions of the print, The Terror even if it looks like you're viewing it through a dirty
sock at least has the same decadent, Technicolor style of the Poe films. Corman's films of this time aren't
historically realistic in the slightest but, even on a small budget, are some
of the only true examples of the baroque in American cinema, bright colours
against dark shadows an irresistible combination in these films of his. As a
result, everything from the dark woodland that Helene leads Andre to near danger
to the sunny beach coast von Leppe's castle looks over, an opulent castle in
itself which naturally has a dank underground family crypt which can be
flooded, The Terror certainly has
the look and style that made the Poe films so rewarding.
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So much so you forget even as
tamer films from their era how nasty and macabre Corman's gothic horror stories actually are. In terms of violent
content, The Terror has a far more
violent scene than many of the films from this period of his in a character
having their eyes gouged out by an eagle and then falling off a cliff. Aside
from this the plot is as appropriately morbid for a gothic story as you could
get as it deals with murder, adultery, a woman getting revenge through
witchcraft and bodily possession. If anything, especially with Karloff as strong a charismatic
individual as always to safely support his scenes on, The Terror would've worked without being a Poe adaptation with its
unconventional original story.
The issue is that Karloff is only in a few scenes and the
film drags without a clear magnetic prescience to support it during the plodding
periods of dialogue. Even when he wasn't the lead, Vincent Price still was the glue that makes a great deal of the Poe
films successful alongside their other virtues. The Terror suffers from a lack of Karloff and how Jack
Nicholson is very young and green behind the ears here, perfect to play the
bumbling son of Peter Lorre in The Raven but still stepping forwards awkwardly
as a lead here, before he became a more charismatic actor, dealing with less
than perfect dialogue without enough relish to it. Barring Karloff, the film is deflated in terms of charisma, needed to prick
its spirit up but only standing out in its more colourful and macabre moments. Likely
the reason The Terror is lesser
known is that it's quite a flat, sluggish story in spite of its short feature
length and moments of sparkle. As much as Corman
is an incredibly talented director and shrewd producer, his tendency to recycle
and take advantage of resources didn't necessary always work, and there's
moments to The Terror that are fun
but does suffer from this.
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