Everyone's favorite public domain horror film after FURY OF THE WOLFMAN. I can still remember watching this sick as a dog one afternoon on PAX back when they were just a funny UHF station, and since I find myself a bit short of Corman Poe's aside from PENDULUM (though I have seen most of them at least on VHS & late nite TV at various times) I decided to dig through my shelves and see if I could find a copy. It's now become my favorite "just put something on to relax" movie, certainly far less arty & intense than PENDULUM, but more dreamlike and ambiguously iconographic. I like the pacing of the film, which (up until the big flood) is slow and meditative, not so much dwelling on shock sequences as atmosphere & ambiance, with a plot that doesn't so much mean specific things as to suggest many other. The background story behind the production is also fascinatingly compelling and one of the fun things about watching it is seeing if you can spot the seams where the different bits were cobbled together.
One thing about the film that I will lobby to anyone is that in spite of the fact that there are no direct attributions to Poe, this film is very much in keeping with his style, right down to the somewhat discombobulated storyline; Like 1934's THE BLACK CAT and good old WEB OF THE SPIDER it seems to be a movie that Poe would have enjoyed as much as it draws on his literary traditions and imagery. Cobwebs, crypts, creepy castles overlooking a wasteland coastline, Napoleonic soldiers being lured from their way by a ghostly siren who starts melting once she is saved, foggy graveyards, ominously clanking iron gates, a love or obsession that lasts beyond the tomb, characters brandishing antiquated looking pistols that are little of no use, and a hero who's own sense of goodness is the root of why he gets wrapped up in the nightmare to begin with. The cackling old witch is a bit much, but her presence too ties the movie's themes in with the kind of horror movie iconography that the film seems to be mimicking in shorthand. Her presence is almost like a quotation from "Macbeth", copy/pasted in to give the story some additional gravitas.
I love stuff like the repeated stock shot of Boris Karloff cranking open that gated door: The repetition of the action is actually very dream or nightmare-like in nature, where we often find ourselves visiting the same scenes repeatedly within the context of a single dream. The legendarily cheap way in which the film was made is itself quite endearing, my favorite story being how Corman instructed his principal actors to each descend the staircase in order, figuring that he could use the footage later even though there was no script indicating the actions. LIke our brains constructing our dreams & nightmares they essentially made it up as they went along, with a number of different people filling the role of director to expose footage as quickly & efficiently as possible which would then be assembled around a core idea that eventually resulted in a quite satisfactory creepy little ghost story. The palpable atmosphere makes up for whatever weakness there may be to the "plot", an attribute that is usually used as a point of criticism but here fits the process marvelously.
The fact that the sets, costumes, cast and crew had just finished another movie & Corman figured he could get some more mileage out of it all was a very keen observation on his part. He may have only been thinking about the financial aspects of stretching out those production dollars as far as he could, but the resultant movie is actually BETTER than many of the same era which were deliberately constructed around a discreet story. Part of this has to do with the inscruitable nature of the "story" but part of it also has to do with the zeitgeist that Corman was tapping into with his whole Poe series as a whole: It's a marvelous homage not only to Poe but to the B movie horror industry in general, and may in fact qualify as the ultimate low-budget movie, made for literally nothing and still delivering it's goods forty-five years later. I've now watched this about two dozen times since feeling the urge to dig it out and have yet to be bored -- Not just because of an urgency to try and discern the "story" the movie tells, but also because re-playing it is sort of like listening to some gloomy gothic radio production over and over again. You get to know the cadences and bursts of dialog very much like one gets to be familiar with a record album. It's a supernatural soap opera, and has as much doom & gloom in it as any of the "actual" Poe derived films that Corman made during the early 1960s.
I was only able to locate two presentations of the film in the piles & piles of non-licensed DVD collections I have -- One by Family Value, that is way over dark contrasted to the point of being unwatchable, and one by Platinum Disc Corp, which is surprisingly good. Sure the color is a bit yellowed, there is print damage galore and the transfer somewhat fuzzy in spots, but that's exactly what I'd expect would have happened to this movie over time as it's aged, neglected and forgotten and lumped aside in favor of the more prestigious productions from this cycle of movies. I took a look at the thread where several luminaries compared notes on the TCM broadcast of what looked like a nicely restored print and not only can I not imagine the movie looking that good I say it takes on an extra element of unreality as this somewhat hard to discern fullframe transfer. The Dollar Store DVD is a travesty, but what other versions do people have, and what do they think of them?
One thing about the film that I will lobby to anyone is that in spite of the fact that there are no direct attributions to Poe, this film is very much in keeping with his style, right down to the somewhat discombobulated storyline; Like 1934's THE BLACK CAT and good old WEB OF THE SPIDER it seems to be a movie that Poe would have enjoyed as much as it draws on his literary traditions and imagery. Cobwebs, crypts, creepy castles overlooking a wasteland coastline, Napoleonic soldiers being lured from their way by a ghostly siren who starts melting once she is saved, foggy graveyards, ominously clanking iron gates, a love or obsession that lasts beyond the tomb, characters brandishing antiquated looking pistols that are little of no use, and a hero who's own sense of goodness is the root of why he gets wrapped up in the nightmare to begin with. The cackling old witch is a bit much, but her presence too ties the movie's themes in with the kind of horror movie iconography that the film seems to be mimicking in shorthand. Her presence is almost like a quotation from "Macbeth", copy/pasted in to give the story some additional gravitas.
I love stuff like the repeated stock shot of Boris Karloff cranking open that gated door: The repetition of the action is actually very dream or nightmare-like in nature, where we often find ourselves visiting the same scenes repeatedly within the context of a single dream. The legendarily cheap way in which the film was made is itself quite endearing, my favorite story being how Corman instructed his principal actors to each descend the staircase in order, figuring that he could use the footage later even though there was no script indicating the actions. LIke our brains constructing our dreams & nightmares they essentially made it up as they went along, with a number of different people filling the role of director to expose footage as quickly & efficiently as possible which would then be assembled around a core idea that eventually resulted in a quite satisfactory creepy little ghost story. The palpable atmosphere makes up for whatever weakness there may be to the "plot", an attribute that is usually used as a point of criticism but here fits the process marvelously.
The fact that the sets, costumes, cast and crew had just finished another movie & Corman figured he could get some more mileage out of it all was a very keen observation on his part. He may have only been thinking about the financial aspects of stretching out those production dollars as far as he could, but the resultant movie is actually BETTER than many of the same era which were deliberately constructed around a discreet story. Part of this has to do with the inscruitable nature of the "story" but part of it also has to do with the zeitgeist that Corman was tapping into with his whole Poe series as a whole: It's a marvelous homage not only to Poe but to the B movie horror industry in general, and may in fact qualify as the ultimate low-budget movie, made for literally nothing and still delivering it's goods forty-five years later. I've now watched this about two dozen times since feeling the urge to dig it out and have yet to be bored -- Not just because of an urgency to try and discern the "story" the movie tells, but also because re-playing it is sort of like listening to some gloomy gothic radio production over and over again. You get to know the cadences and bursts of dialog very much like one gets to be familiar with a record album. It's a supernatural soap opera, and has as much doom & gloom in it as any of the "actual" Poe derived films that Corman made during the early 1960s.
I was only able to locate two presentations of the film in the piles & piles of non-licensed DVD collections I have -- One by Family Value, that is way over dark contrasted to the point of being unwatchable, and one by Platinum Disc Corp, which is surprisingly good. Sure the color is a bit yellowed, there is print damage galore and the transfer somewhat fuzzy in spots, but that's exactly what I'd expect would have happened to this movie over time as it's aged, neglected and forgotten and lumped aside in favor of the more prestigious productions from this cycle of movies. I took a look at the thread where several luminaries compared notes on the TCM broadcast of what looked like a nicely restored print and not only can I not imagine the movie looking that good I say it takes on an extra element of unreality as this somewhat hard to discern fullframe transfer. The Dollar Store DVD is a travesty, but what other versions do people have, and what do they think of them?
![0]](http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/alien.gif)
