Crypt of the Living Dead - 1973

Also known as Hannah, Queen of the Vampires.

The black and white era of movies was over in the 60's pretty much.  There was a line in the mid 60's where just about everything was being shot in color, and whether that's cause the audience expected it, or color got cheaper, or black and white wasn't "cool" anymore, I'm not really sure.  I expect it would've been a combination of all of these.

However, some outlying films were still being made in black and white, and Crypt aka Hannah was one of these.  But I tell you, this movie looks and sounds and plays out like it was made LONG before 1973.  IMDb and Wikipedia don't claim that this is one to have been made earlier and just released now, so I'm left to assume that this movie is incredibly dated, no doubt extremely low budget, and quite scraping.  Scraping as in, scraping the bottom of the barrel.  It's a term, and I'm going to start saying it.

This is a heavily atmospheric movie, which I will admit I liked.  It had a creepy eeriness to the movie, and it was well made.  I liked the music a lot and even incorrectly guessed it was done by a well known person - spoiler alert it was not.  Good music though, good cinematography, and a strangeness that suited my mood quite well.

I'll admit that after Last of the Belles I was feeling really uninteresting in this boxset.  I didn't want to delve into another bad 70's movie, and I was really against the prospect which I do have to face here:  this boxset is not sci fi, horror, or any cool genre like that.  This is a set of themed movies and...  Ugh, okay fine.  I will reveal the boxset:

As you can see, this sounds promising, until you realize that by "cheesy" they are basically going to throw any sort of random-ass unknown public domain 70's movie onto it and justify it cause "it's from the 70's".  Of course this is actually two sets back to back, the Excellent 80's and the Swingin' 70's which is where I started.

It was a decent enough return to the horror or thriller genre, and I was glad to have picked this one.  Some dumb western or "comedy" movie might've pushed me over the edge of sanity.  3.5 stars.