Hero and the Terror - 1988

We're entering into that weird area again, where I doubt if my reviews are really worthy of writing.  I'm telling you, it's hard to write movie reviews and keep up the drinking when you've got a wife and a job (plus I briefly held 2 jobs for a little bit there).  I've just not had that much free time, been skipping my exercise and diet too.  In summary, I suck, and I'm kind of glad no one reads my blog.

Hero and the Terror is a movie I saw on TV about 10 years ago when I lived in a different town.  It was a different world then, blah blah, but I was the same person.  Being the same, I had a passing interest in Chuck Norris because I am a big fan of Jean Claude Van Damme and Bruce Lee.  I was feeling like if I liked martial arts and all, I was doing a disservice by not watching anything by Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal.  So I saw this movie was on AMC or something, and I recorded and watched it.

Now I'm going to say right here that I've had these experiences before.  The experience where you see a movie and then later you watch it again and it's just not as good.  It's not like I remembered thinking Hero and Terror was great or anything, but I definitely thought it was alright.  Because it has one major difference between it and several other action movies:  it has a plot, and that plot incorporates horror film elements.

Well, maybe not horror, but suspense or thriller.  So I remembered it as "that action movie that kind of had horror parts" and then when it came on Netflix instant view, I saw it again.  This movie has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and even though I don't understand how their rating works, I guess that's bad.  It just seems backwards.  If it's 0% rotten, doesn't that mean it's good?  It's not rotten?  Yeah, whatever bro.

Hero and Terror is a movie thing about a hero cop (Norris) who stopped some terror killer (other guy) and then is plagued by memories of it for super long.  He's all whiny and depressed, but moving on with his life and banging his psychiatrist (isn't that like, a huge conflict of interest?)  Then, in the most ridiculous way of escaping prison, the terror escapes.  At first no one is sure if the kills that happen then after are the terror or not.  Norris's cop guy is kinda sure, "has a feeling" but doesn't wanna give in to paranoia.

Yadda yadda yadda, things go on, there's filler, and you know how it ends without me telling you.  One cool thing, they filmed at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.  I used to live within walking distance of that theater, and I once went there to see some lame stand up comedy show with my ex girlfriend.  It was lame.  I didn't get laid for it, either.

What I'm getting at here, and haven't said yet, is that the horror element I grossly over exaggerated in my mind.  Sure, there's some suspense, and there's not much action.  All the kills were all done in a very un-horror way, and I really had over-done the amount of tension and whatever in this flick.  It's more a drama, and less a horror.  But it deserves points for trying, 1.5 points to be precise.

Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator - 1990

Well, here's what I wish would be a first and last time I ever watch a movie like this:  a movie where, literally, no one involved has done anything else.  Actors, director, etc.  This movie was the first and last for everyone involved.  That's a bad sign right there.  But, I decided to watch it, convinced somehow that the great name of the movie would somehow make up for it.  It didn't.

Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (SSITI) is the story of some rich people who, to get their kicks or whatever, decide to play these long drawn out games of death, intrigue, mystery, and stuff.  The movie begins in the midst of one of these, and it's like a classic wife is the betrayer type game, and then it ends with someone being tortured and all this stuff, and then "Roberta" takes off her wig to reveal it's a man.  Cut to the characters the next day discussing how great the game went.

SSITI then goes through the normal story, character A is leading the games, characters B and C think the games are going too far, they start to have an affair, and they wanna stop character A.  A won't give up, the game turns deadly, and things go all wacky.  B and C suffer some set backs and apparent double crossing, and then spoiler warning (but you won't see this movie anyways) it was all an elaborate game, another elaborate game, and the movie ends with no surprises whatsoever.

Like I said, no one went on to anything else, and that's the most predictable thing about this movie.  The actors are all definitely not good, they are trying really hard which makes it a little worse for me, and it's just painful to watch.  The pacing in the movie also sucks.  It feels overly long, extremely low budget, and it feels impossible to take it seriously.

The worst part about it?  Not only does no one ever get stuffed into an incinerator, no one ever even tries to stuff someone, talks about stuffing someone, or looks at an incinerator.  There's no fucking incinerator in the movie AT ALL.  How the fuck does that make sense?!

Maybe, maybe with a few beers and some good comedians you could rip this to a whole new level and make it fun but....it's probably not worth it.  Your efforts would be better spent on a more enjoyable movie.  I give this one zero stars.

Independence Day - 1996

Said it before, will say it again, I write about whatever I want.   Bittttttches.   I love this movie.  Independence Day feels gloriously 90's.  The 90's were an awesome time to be seeing movies, and an awesome time to be a kid.  I remember watching this, maybe not in theaters, but when it came out on VHS.  I was 9 or 10 at the time, and everyone at my elementary school was talking about this movie.  The quote of the year was "Hello boys, I'm baaaaaaaack" and if you didn't get it you weren't cool.  Of course for me, I got it, but still wasn't cool - but that's a different blog.

I miss feeling like movies are special.  I miss feeling like movies are something that everybody will love.  When these big summer movies come out now they're normally just so bad that they're not momentous.  I watched the new movie San Andreas yesterday at the theater, and it was just so bland.  It's all bad CGI, it's characters are undeveloped, over-makeup-ed, and desperately fake looking....it's just got no heart, no soul, and no like-ability to it.

Movies like ID4 had a huge emphasis on the characters.  Sure, they weren't like the most developed ever and followed some typical roles, but they were human, they were made to be imperfect.  One thing which I used to see and don't any more is the presence of realistic looking actors.  I hate how, in movies that come out now, everyone has to look so fuckin tough and/or beautiful.  Every man has his trademark 5:00 shadow, a ripped 6-pack chest, and a head of hair so thick you could stand on it.  Every girl has grade A tits, a flat stomach, and looks like a total bitch.

I miss actors like Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman.  Both are really good looking men, but they weren't the Hollywood look that is escalating now.  I just feel like Hollywood is invading us with unreal looking stars, and it makes them harder to relate to, for me.  No one looks real.  In the new Avengers movies, there isn't a single character who looks real to me.  I know that Hollywood has been pushing the strong and beautiful all along, but they used to let real actors act, and they used to not care as much about things like origin and body type.

I guess I feel like someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't get a chance to be a major film star now.  People would gripe about his accent and he wouldn't get cast in a movie where he plays a robot.  "Why would a robot have an Austrian accent?" would make the producers back their money behind a more acceptable American star.  Back in the 80's and 90's, I just don't think there was the big money pressure.  People made movies to make money, just like now, but they also were allowed more creativity, weren't pressured to make as much money.  It wasn't like every single movie HAD to be #1 at the box office.

I dunno.  It's hard to quantify.  I just love Independence Day.  With 2 sequels coming, I'm sure it'll get ruined just like Star Trek and the upcoming Star Wars, but you know, fuck it.  The original is a fucking classic.  Not quite a movie review per say, but you don't need a plot and scene analysis.  If you haven't seen this movie, something is wrong with you.  Go see it.

Grizzly - 1976

"Jaws with claws" as the poster and the tagline read, this was a brief excursion into animal attack movies started by Jaws a couple years earlier. And Jaws set the bar pretty high for animal attack films. Grizzly is directed by William Girdler, who directed some great 70's films and then died in a helicopter crash. Tragic really, as a lot of his films showed promise or at least innovation. I think he probably would've gone on to be quite successful if he didn't die so young.

Grizzly is the classic story of a towering 18 foot grizzly who gets a taste for human flesh and starts rampaging all throughout the woods. It's got everything you'd expect from a movie like this: the tough cop good guy who is out to stop the monster, the blinded politician who either doesn't care about the threat or is too worried about bad publicity to follow the orders of the tough cop, and plenty of guys in bell bottoms running around getting bloodied up by the beast. It's medium paced, poorly edited, but followed through with getting some real bears and some genuinely cool moments.

I love animal attack movies. Especially when they were real animals instead of retarded CG things that look ridiculous. Girdler's other animal attack movie, Day of the Animals, is in my opinion way better then this one, but this movie is pretty entertaining as well.  Animal attack movies are just a lot of fun to me, you get the classic horror things, but you also don't get to have the killer ruined by a bad story line or bad acting or dialogue. So many times the killer could've been more menacing if only the film hadn't shown the killer doing stupid things or saying stupid things. Animal attack movies circumvent that with inhuman killers.

Plus in the older films like this, you couldn't show the bear that much since the animal needed a trainer and was relatively uncontrollable. You can almost feel the genuine fear of the actors and the film crew at the sight of some huge fucking grizzly roaring in your face. I'd feel fuckin freaked when I see a real bear attacking a real guy in the film, and knowing that even if that's his trainer right there, shit does go wrong and accidents happen. It's pretty impressive to see these sorts of scenes take place.

The pacing was kind of slow and there are plenty of times in the movie when it just feels like filler. The kills are usually not shown in detail, and when they are they're pretty lame. But it's worth it for the use of the real bear, for the acting which is pretty good, and for the ultimate payoff. The last 5 minutes are really, really cool.

This movie is bound to be eventually lost in time, it's pretty forgettable and all. Jaws will probably survive for quite a while longer as films like this just disappear into the sands of time. It's a shame, but it's also just the way of things. This director would go on to direct the equally good and freaky film The Manitou, which feels very similar in tone and pacing. Makes a lot of sense they were done by the same dude. This is a worthy entrance into the animal attack movies I've seen, not as good as Prophecy or Day of the Animals, but better than half of those bad shark movies and way better than some bullshit film like Stanley.

I give it a standard 2.5 stars.

Surf Nazis Must Die - 1987

Have I done anything Troma yet?  I'm too neglectful right now to check, but my gut feeling says yes. Okay, I'll check.  Having just now checked, I don't know still.  Troma is/was a production and distribution company led by Lloyd Kaufman who was behind those Toxic Avenger films.  Side note, apparently he was also in a bit part in the first Rocky movie.  Huh.  Who knew?  That'd be a good "degrees of Kevin Bacon" thing to remember right there.

Anyways, bottom of the barrel doesn't describe some of these movies his company was involved in.  Sure, sometimes they could get away with their awfulness by being "comedy" films, like the sort of comedy where people make visual gags and penis jokes.  Not funny, in other words.  Whatever.  The point is, some of the movies are trying to be funny, some are trying to be scary, some are just plain bad ideas all around.

Surf Nazis Must Die is the latter in that breakdown, it is just an all around bad idea, bad movie.  It doesn't really try to be funny, or if it does it's just such an undeveloped type of humor that even if it was funny to begin with, it would kill the comic potential with it's delivery.  The plot's about as loose as they come, some local gang is trying to control the beach, and they dress up like and take the names of Nazis.  Yeeeeeeeeep.

Okay, so it's not all bad.  It's just that really nothing happens in this movie.  Like, seriously, the movie is 83 minutes long and a good 81 minutes of that is filler.  Footage of people surfing, the gang walking around and acting vaguely tough, some dialogue...it's not like killing you to watch it, but it is still bland as fuck filler.  There's very little that happens in this movie.  I honestly don't even remember most of the middle part.  But basically, the gang kills this black guy and then his mother is out for revenge.  That's the plot.

For the first part of the film we follow "Smeg", a Surf Nazi-junior type guy.  He lives with his mom, and there are some minor funny interactions there, but mostly it's dulls-ville o'rama.  Man, it really feels like I have used that exact description before for something else.  I wonder what it was.  I'm not the most creative typist in the world.  I wonder for example how many times I've put the word "anyways" in this blog.

The film is instantly forgettable, boring, and cheaply made.  Nothing happens, as I said earlier, also.  There's not really any blood, there's a little nudity, and there's "bad language" but you know this movie honestly felt PG in it's display of itself.  It doesn't feel offensive at all.  In fact, I kinda got lost in the surfers and it made me really want to try surfing more than anything else.

For nothing as bad as say, a movie where I'll turn it off, for not making me want to die, and probably some higher like-ability rating had I been drunk/high, I'll give it a full 1 star.

The Babadook - 2014

This was not going to be an entry, believe me.  I kind of want to go back and delete some of my old entries, for movies that "don't count" but I also am always thinking, it doesn't matter anyways.  But there's that part of me that thinks, "what if people actually do start reading my website, and they wonder wtf is up with me reviewing Nightcrawler on a website called Grindhouse Review?"  Look, simpleton, this website abides by no rules.  It just is.  The exception is not the rule.  Just cause I review some non-Grindhouse movies does not mean I don't get to name my site that.  Besides how boring would this be if I only reviewed the same fuckin 100 something movies every other cult, grindhouse, B horror, etc blog is reviewing??

You can see a review of Rocky Horror on just about every single website ever.  Fuck, that shit's been talked about in the Wall Street Journal.  C'mon.  I wanted to be on the outskirts.  You know, the fucking Lone Gunman.  Like in X-Files.  How cool would it be to actually be in a group like that??  Some brilliant dudes on the outskirts, fighting the government, friends with the FBI...man I love that fuckin show.  BTW, new X-Files are coming, in case you live under a rock.

The Babadook is a film that will surely become a "cult classic".  This must be placed in quotations because new films cannot become cult for at least ten to twenty years.  They have to survive the test of time.  But I do actually think this one will.  Now, I don't want to say it's the best film ever and give it some giant ringing endorsement, but this movie does deserve praise.

The best thing about horror, as I've said again and again, is the fear of the unknown.  That as well as atmosphere.  Get the unknown, the atmosphere, and then the music and acting, and your film will work.  This film has all of that done expertly.  It's not going to redefine horror as it is, but it takes a fairly simple idea, runs with it, and does it well.  In a world where horror films are escalating their shock value, the blood and guts and "jump" factor, this one dares to take horror back to it's creepy beginnings, where just being weird was enough, and you don't GET to jump.  Rather, you have to imagine, and let your mind scare you more than anything else.

Like nudity, it's what you don't see.  People like lingerie for a reason.  Sure, I like a good ol' naked chick too, but I'd much rather see a slinky striptease.  People know that, as quoted by Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski "The brain is the biggest erogenous zone", well I argue it's the same with horror, except instead of erogenous, uh, scariest??  Well yeah, it was a far way to go to make that quote work.

The Babadook took a genre I hate, kids in horror movies, and made it good.  Like I said it's simple.  Mother and child are isolated.  Enter the threat, this time in form of a bizarre children's book titled "The Babadook" that one day is just on the kid's shelf like all the others.  It's off kilter story and drawings are too dark, they scare the mother and she decides not to read the rest.  After reading the book, the child starts acting strangely, is actively scared all the time, and says he is seeing the Babadook.  The mother of course thinks the child is just a dick, and throws out the book.  But there is no stopping The Babadook.

The movie moves along mostly as expected, the only differing twist would be the bizarre ending.  I understand these type of ideas are generally hard to end, they either have to defeat the monster or die.  But in defeating said monster, usually there is a confrontation.  In that there is closure, and this film I think wanted to avoid that.  So the ending is a bit weird and I didn't exactly like it, but I understand why it ended the way it did.  The film does what I love which is to leave things not quite right, and kinda say fuck you to it's audience.

The Babadook itself relies mostly on the sound for it's scares.  Okay, sure there are some vision effects too, but the trailer and the movie are heavily based on the sounds of the creature itself and the music.  The music in the movie is awesome.  The score is creepy, interesting, dynamic, and unique.  The sounds of the Babadook, however, are dumb.  Like when you do a "croaky frog" voice, it's lame.  But I guess unique, and apparently people online found it scary, so whatevs.

All in all, for being a good horror film, and being unique, I wanted to give it 4 stars.  I feel like, in retrospect, it might only deserve 3, but I'll go with my first thought.  Also, the kid actor in the film was really good.  One of the best I've ever seen actually.

Infra-man - 1975

Also known as The Super Inframan and Chinese Hercules

Well, here we go, this review is going to be hard to write.  I am going to admit right off that I don't necessarily like movies like this, nor do I know a lot about them.  The infamous Shaw brothers produced this movie, and like many of their other productions it's pretty high budget and obviously took a lot of work.  I was also drunk during parts of this, watching it over the span of a couple days because I literally cannot watch a movie like this in one sitting.

Here is how I work:  I like me some flash and fast pacing, but I also like some straight forwardness, some plot, and a well paced movie versus just nonstop action.  I'll probably get torn a new one from all my nonexistent readers for giving Infra-man low marks.  But who the fuck cares.

This movie is a pure, 100% fighting nonsense whatever thing.  I feel completely sure about saying that even though my grasp of the "plot" wasn't that strong.  Essentially some evil queen comes to Earth with her army of rubber suit monsters, the humans create Infra-man out of some normal dude, Infra-man is the warrior for the Earth, and yup that's it.  The next like hour and 15 minutes is fighting, fighting fighting, flips, explosions, explosions, monsters, weird dialogue....it's like a fucking whirlwind hits you.

The movie is probably the best one ever if you love things like Power Rangers, Ultraman, and the like.  It has endless childish high paced action violence, but if you're looking for anything substantial....well you might want to looks somewhere else.  Not that this movie gets lumped into the countless bad movies out there.  It's just that it's about as deep as a puddle in the middle of the hottest day in the Sahara desert....there's really nothing to it.  Now, everyone does their jobs, of course, and the movie looks great.  It's high production value, the costumes and sets are awesome, and actors are classically so over the top and ridiculous that it's in a whole new league of acting.

My best advice is, put it on if you're in the mood for action, but childish action, and if you wanna see something that's Godzilla-like in it's over the top-ness and insanity, but less plot and explanation and more of shit blowing the fuck up.  For what it is it's by far the best in it's league, and nothing comes even close to it's weirdness.  I am not going to give it a rating, cause by my standards it's maybe just a 3 or something, but these are not my types of films.  So, enjoy it for what it is.

Night Fright - 1967

I apologize for taking extraordinarily long to write this review and finish this movie.  I realize I talked about this all the way back in Star Knight, as this was the next movie in the boxset I was watching.  Side talk here, why is is boxset not a word?  I get the red squiggly guy under it and it wants it to be box set.  But I think we should accept boxset as a word.  Like a portmanteau, you know, except you're not shortening anything....

Anyways, what I did was start Night Fright on the DVD, get distracted, not finish it, then forget I had started it altogether, watch other things for the next few days/weeks, and then finally re-read my blog (hey, someone has to read it right?  I might as well be the only one) and realize I never finished Night Fright.  Of course, I did rewatch most of the footage I'd already seen, apparently I was 40 minutes in when I'd stopped, but I didn't remember anything after 23 minutes in.

This movie is the king of forgettable, that's for sure.  This movie, I had to double check here, was not a Corman produced movie, but damn does it feel like it.  It feels like some incredibly bland copycat movie.  You know how you go into the store, and you find like Coca Cola, and then there's the store's version?  It's like that.  This movie is essentially the Shasta Cola of movies.  It may be incredibly cheap, but also has no taste, less caffeine, and basically is nowhere near as well known.  Now notice I stayed away from the word "good" cause I dunno if Coke qualifies as good, but since millions of people drink it, throw in good too.

I feel like some of the screen shots I've put in don't necessarily captivate the movie that well.  Cause, well they're normally of something happening, whether it's the monster, or nudity, or whatever.  I took a specific screen shot in this movie to try and captivate the whole movie in one image.  Here it is:

Yes, this shot is Night Fright.  Under lit, poorly shot, out of focus...yes, this shot is Night Fright.  A picture here truly is worth 1000 words.

John Agar stars as a cop in some podunk town where some restless teens are roaming around gettin' in all sorts o' tangles, and a spaceship lands.  There is some giant weird monster guy that appears out the ship and starts slaughtering peeps.  The idiot teenagers have pointless interactions as hero Rex and his bossy girlfriend try to save everyone, and John Agar really hams it up as the big man in charge.

The movie is really this badly lit for most of it, the recording equipment was apparently bought from the local dollar store, and it shows.  The monster actually looks pretty cool too - it's supposed to be some giant mutated alligator thing. The only problem, it's never shown in a way where we can actually see what it looks like, this is another case where the bad editing, bad lighting, and terrible camera work make it worse than it needed to be.

All in all, it's definitive 60's trash, grade Z sci fi horror with zero difference factor, which is why it get's a slamminnnnn 2 stars.

A Trip to the Moon - 1902

This review will refer to the hand-colored, 2011 restored version featuring music from the French band "Air".

What first caught my eye in A Trip to the Moon was that it didn't have any dialogue title cards.  There are a few segments wherein people talk, they argue, there is evident talking, and normally one or two dialogue cards would come up, but his movie had none.  Whether that is due to the lack of them in the original or that is exclusive to this version I don't know.

Secondly, the coloring is just so much fun to watch.  The movie rate is 22 frames per second, quite a bit slower than the modern films, and thus it looks a little more jumpy.  And interspersed in those frames you can see the coloring jumping around, generally going into the wrong areas, etc.  It's really quite interesting to see and to pause the movie and imagine those people individually coloring the frames.

The other thing I noticed and said to my wife while we watched is that it's amazing how you can still tell to this day just how much work they put into this film.  Everything that was drawn by hand, all the backgrounds, all the sets and the props, they are absolutely amazing.  Also, of course the camera never moves.  In those days the camera was huge, expensive, and you only had one of them.  So in that way this feels a lot more like a play.

The film story line is of some men that make a rocket that will go to the moon, they shoot it to the moon where it famously lands in the eye of the moon.  On the moon they encounter a race of people, who don't want them there.  That's basically it, I mean it's only 18 minutes long so there's not that much else to write about plot wise.

The story feels like a mix between a fantasy and a comedy, although there aren't big laughs they were going for, some of the stuff is done in a silly, fun-having way.  It feels very accessible, there is something there for everybody, in a good way.

The sequence on the moon feels strange, very surreal, and it is slightly confusing.  Sometimes the sequences that take place don't seem to link very well, and although it's never a big WTF moment or anything, some things kind of make you guess at what happened.

All in all this is necessary viewing for probably everyone to understand film's beginnings.  Although I appreciated the color, I think watching it in black and white would be fine.  I also didn't really enjoy the new soundtrack by Air, I would've liked to have seen it without a soundtrack, or with whatever sound it had originally had.

Scared to Death - 1947

In what is to be my oldest movie review before the next movie review I do, I look at Scared to Death from 1947. This movie was Bela Lugosi's only starring role in a color film, he was in some other color things but not in starring roles apparently.  I am reminded of that last Lugosi film I saw, The Black Sleep, which turned out to be quite awful.

This movie reminds me of that one in some ways, in fact, this movie reminds me of just about every similar horror movie.  It's got its weirdo characters: the midget, always a staple in some of these horror movies (especially if they act like a savage beast, have no lines, and have a name like Indigo that makes no practical sense but sounds vaguely foreign).  It's got the hypnotist, again a common character (should always hypnotize just by voice and eyes, and have either a mystical name, or a "Professor" or "Doctor" preface such as in this film, Professor Leonide).  And at last it has the masked woman - slightly different maybe but it's really just a twist on the mystery monster/ghost thing, so it shouldn't get that many points.

By the way, what happened to the hypnotist?  I could just start naming movies at the drop of a hat from the 50's-70's that had hypnotists.  They totally disappeared.  I wonder what the last movie with a evil weird hypnotist was....

The plot centers around this woman who tells the tale of how she died (how shocking).  Her bizarre memories involve this hypnotist (Lugosi) with his midget sidekick.  There is the masked figure, and there is policeman Bill Raymond who is trying to figure out what's going on.  Bill Raymond is one of those typical B movie characters too, he's the "big dumb cop who has his heart in the right place" which is closely related to "the lovable idiot".  He has typically bad dialogue including "There were screams inside! You gotta admit that it's in the longitude of my profession to make with an investigatory reaction there to- What am I saying?"  See it's funny because he used all this professional talk but didn't actually know what it meant!!  IT'S FUNNY!

There is an equally bad line I wanted to put when he talks about his metabolism.  His love interest makes him some sort of food, maybe it was coffee and offers it to him.  He has some line about how it would be bad for his metabolism, then walks away saying "Interesting word, metabolism.  It'd be a lot more interesting if I knew what it meant."  Ugh, fucking stab my ear holes with pitchforks why don't you?  It's not funny, it's not clever, and it makes no fucking sense.  How did he use the word perfectly in a sentence, but not know what it meant?  He is so typically written too, just a thorough good guy, always doing the right thing and constantly after the girl, and we know that though she's smarter than him and a free spirit she'll settle with him and his down home, homespun childish charm.  Just fucking shoot me instead.

George Zucco is also in this movie, as the husband to the dead girl, and he really doesn't do anything memorable.  Sure, I may have not been paying the strictest attention but he is just super forgettable in this flick.  The whole thing kind of moves along at a quick pace at least, the movie is just over an hour so how long can it possibly feel?  Fortunately there are no more bad characters in this, Lugosi has a heavy presence in the movie, and the whole hypnotist thing is downplayed to where it doesn't get annoying.  Also the actress, Molly Lamont, was quite good.  She stopped acting 50 years before she died, I wonder why?  She was actually pretty decent.

So the movie has some entertainment value, and I think it's mostly due to the fact it was made in '47 that makes it kind of bad.  I mean, all things considered it didn't feel almost 70 years old.  Those things considered, I'll bump it to two stars.

The Terror - 1963

I have given the Corman formula in the past, for She Gods of Shark Reef and for The Beast with a Million Eyes.  It's all bland and whatever, he makes bad movies, however there is a "but" in there somewhere.  But, sometimes he had a higher budget, or accidentally made something good, or had someone else's script or whatever.  This is one of those cases.  Not to say this movie is good, cause it's not, but it is higher budget, doesn't follow the formula Corman sets, and is different.

This film is well known as one of Boris Karloff's few color films, and as an early starring role for Jack Nicholson.  Shot in a reported 4 days on a shoestring budget by the master of throwing cheap movies together, it was filmed in Big Sur, California in parts, and the scenery is beautiful. Additionally, some back up footage in the movie was directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola. Those things add up to this movie being slightly well known in terms of early 60's horror films.

Those ingredients, you'll notice don't spell out anything good though.  Sure, Jack Nicholson and Coppola and Karloff = good, but shot in 4 days = way too rushed, no cohesion, and a total mess.  The plot is loose, basically some ghost lady leads Jack Nicholson's character to a secluded castle where he encounters Boris Karloff as the old baron with a secret, a mysterious painting, and whatever.

It's all trying to capitalize on atmosphere, there are no truly scary or even thrilling moments.  It tries desperately to frighten with this bizarre ghost story, but just comes off as trying too hard in most parts.  Nicholson gives no sign that he would go on to become an actor worth noting and watching.  Here he sounds overly nasally, irritating, and his dialogue is bland.  Karloff comes off as the been-there-done-that, "I'm only here cause you're paying me" kind of acting.

The sets and the scenery are kinda cool.  As I said, filmed in Big Sur, CA (Google image search it) and using sets from some previously shot films, it looks the part.  The real bad part of it though is the pacing.  It's incredibly slow, it's all bad dialogue, and it just hurts.  Plus, we know how it will go so early on that most of the film just feels tedious.  I always wonder how much of me is jaded by modern films, and how much of me is just hating cause it is a bad movie.  Was this movie ever considered cutting edge?  I don't know, but maybe.  It could scare you, I guess.

Psychological horror for me is the worst kind, I like movies like Alien when it comes to horror.  I just don't care about psychological horror, and most other subgenres like that.  Ghost stories to me are some of the worst.  It's just such a bland, no frills type of horror.  Ghost movies like this almost always mean no effects will be had, no one is gonna die except the evil dude (Karloff), and it's a mystery that's painfully obvious to us as the audience the whole way through.  It just makes me want to smack someone.

I feel like I could say more about this movie, but fuck it.  Who cares.  A star for the actors and directors involved and for Big Sur.