The Terror (1963)
Posted on August 7, 2005
Filed Under Turkeys
If you’ve ever finished an exam twenty minutes or so before the end of the time allotted you might be familiar with the anxiety of not knowing whether it is a good or a bad sign. Did you read all of the questions properly? Have you answered the question itself and avoided the trap of reeling out a pre-prepared body of knowledge which is only tangentially linked to the topic you’re being tested on? If so then you can probably sympathise with Roger Corman, who finished filming his 1963 classic The Raven a whole two days in advance. This being Corman he didn’t use his remaining time to mull over his original movie but decided instead to make an entirely new film (that’s right, in 48 hours) which utilised The Raven’s sets and its star actor, Boris Karloff, who was contractually tied to the director from the initial project.
The result of this hurried frenzy of film making was The Terror, a bizarre tale of a young soldier returning from the French Revolutionary Wars who gets caught up in a paranormal trial of strength between the reclusive Baron von Leffe (what is it with the aristocracy? Perhaps Tony Blair was right about the House of Lords…) and a weird hag who has managed to harness the spirit of his dead wife. The soldier in question is Jack Nicholson (who was also still bound by his Raven contract) and as far as bad casting goes this has to rank alongside John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn in The Conqueror. Ordinarily you’d forgive Corman for this-especially as this a rush job even by his standards-but as the threadbare plot is dependant on a higher level of atmospherics than his usual offerings it is difficult to overlook. Boris Karloff puts in a typical Boris Karloff performance and is the lynchpin of a film which somehow manages to be both erratically disjointed AND mind numbingly monotonous at the same time. There are some moments that’ll wake you up along the way, one being a surprisingly shocking and effective attack on one of the characters (they seem to pop in and out of the story without ever having their presence or identity explained) by the hag’s pet raven (also presumably still under contract).
The Terror is a very poor film, though that shouldn’t be surprising when the circumstances of its production are considered. For that alone it’s probably worth watching once, just to appreciate what it is possible to do in two days of frantic film making. As The Raven itself is a qualitative world apart at least Corman can escape the post-exam lecture on using his time productively.
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