Compaired to todays output it is about as terrifing as chocklate ice cream.

You have a very young Jack Nicholson and a very old Boris Karloff performing this little drama on sets you should recognize from a dozen other "B" Horror films.

Nicholeson's preformance forshadows his later success.

For its time, this is an above average film, an excellent example of the type and period which is why I give it a 5.

I found it well worth watching.
I quite enjoyed it, but that is dating myself.


Terror-able   September 13, 2004
 4 out of 10 found this review helpful

Sluggish pacing and some questionable shots make THE TERROR a recommendation only for those who want to see a very young Jack Nicholson and a very old Boris Karloff in something other than the immeasurably superior THE RAVEN. Director Roger Corman lays the atmosphere on with a trowel and leaves continuity, consistency and coherence far behind in his wake.
Karloff plays the Baron of a dark and brooding castle and Nicholson plays a misplaced French lieutenant in circa 1805 Somewherevania. There's a long dead wife, a diaphanous maiden prowling about a crypt at night and an old crone with a falcon borrowed from the set of Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS. The plot? Well, you can mix those ingredients together and probably come up with something a little more substantial than this one.
Not recommended.



Yes, Adult Human Beings Really Got Together and Made This!   September 7, 2002
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

The history of the movie is far more interesting than the movie, itself. Corman had three extra days after his prematurely wrapped The Raven shoot, and tossed this thing together off the top of his (and everybody else's) head to end up making two features for the price of one. Considering the circumstances, the thing is a masterpiece.

Of course, the finished product neither knows nor cares about the circumstances, which is why this movie is doubly entertaining. The mix of costuming and acting styles, the endless anachronisms throwing the audience out of suspension of disbelief that they are in Napoleonic era Germany (or is it supposed to be Spain? and if so, why so many German names? and if not, where does one get a seaside cliff in Germany?) - not to mention the genuinely really bad acting from pretty much everyone involved (including Karloff, who almost certainly didn't take it seriously), and the grossly mixed accents of the cast - make this one endlessly entertaining, in that drop-your-jaw, I-can't-believe-adult-human-beings-actually-got-together-and-made-this-thing kind of way.

It actually has a plot, which if you're really attentive and diligent you can pick out in the last five minutes of the movie, and if you do, it's terribly clever and grossly improbable, which just makes it all that much more fun.

But you won't care about that. What you really want to see is Jack Nicholson performing flatter than a block of wood, his then-wife Sandra Knight with an accent and acting style flatter still (though she is quite beautiful), Dorothy Neumann as a cackling revenge-driven old witch, Bronx-accented Dick Miller as a supposedly very German manservant, and Karloff struggling to keep a straight face given all the preceding impediments.

Nicholson happily confesses in interviews that they all had a ball making this wonderfully absurd movie, and it actually shows. Interestingly enough, if you're in the right mood, you can even see the horror movie this almost was, if they'd had more time to make it really work. There are some good gore effects - a man's eyes gouged out by a killer hawk, and an incredibly goopy melting woman, topping the list - and it's pretty handsomely produced, even with a decently eerie musical soundtrack throughout.

Don't watch it because it's good - watch it because it's FUN.