TITLE-The Terror
SOURCE-DVD-R from an airing on Elvira's Movie Macabre 2010
There is so many horror films in the public domain. And by 2010 I was pretty sure I had seen all of them. Then late one weekend night on the revival of Elvira's Movie Macabre she showed The Terror. Sure for years I had heard a bit about this film. How it had 5 directors. And was made of leftover sets from Roger Corman's The Raven. I sat there at 3am watching it and being half asleep and how disjointed the film is made it into this odd experience.
Months later the episode was reran and I recorded it to a DVD-R. Thinking that these episodes wouldn't get a DVD release. They did but since I had recorded every episode I only bought the DVDs that had unaired episodes.
Skip ahead 11 years. I've been slowly thinning my DVD collection. Found a box that was full of stuff I had recorded in the 2 years I had my dvd recorder hooked up to the Satellite. Saw The Terror and threw it in to listen to/watch while I did stuff around the house. But maybe 10 minutes into the film the oddness of the film had captured my full attention.
Set back in 1806 The Terror has Jack Nicholson as Andre Duvalier. A soldier who got lost when fleeing a battle. He meets up with a woman. Who looks a lot like a local Baron's wife. A wife who died a few decades ago. Andre and Dick Miller,as Stefan,team up and capture a local witch. Who they believe is behind a bunch of stuff.
But nope PLOT TWIST. The Baron is actually someone named Eric.Eric is the son of the witch. Seems Eric was having an affair with the Baron's wife. And after the Baron died Eric took over his identity. In the 20 years that have passed Eric has convinced himself he is the Baron.
Yea it sounds way way complicated and it is. But what do you expect from a film that has 5 directors,maybe 6. It started off with 60 pages of script and 2 days to film. The first director is Roger Corman. And all the scenes with Boris Kaloff as the Baron where filmed in those 2 days.
3 months later Corman hired Frances Ford Coppola,since Corman was in the Union and Coppola wasn't. Coppola went out to the Big Sur area of California. Used a bunch of film students from UCLA and filmed for 11 days.
On to the third director.This was Dennis Jakob,a friend of Coppolas. Jakob filmed for 3 days and Jakob ended up being a stand in for Kaloff in a few scenes.
Monte Hellman was the 4th.He filmed for 5 days.Hellman filmed in two locations,Santa Barbara and Palos Verdes.It was during this time that Jack Hill was brought in to rework the script. Which caused a change in the film's plot. According to Hill and Hellman lots of what Coppola filmed was throw out.
This leads to Jack Hill being the 5th director. This was almost a year after the first stuff was shot. Corman claims that Hill had to leave before he finished filming and Jack Nicholson filmed the last day of filming. Hill says that it was Corman that filmed that day. Who knows really.
Corman took what these 5 or 6 directors filmed.Cut it all together and decided that some reshoots were needed. And during the reshoots is when the plot twist of Eric pretending to be the Baron was added.
Sure the film is odd and feels very disjointed. And even after seeing it a few times I wasn't sure of all of the plot. But it is a great looking film for how low budget it is. And it is a film that any one with even a little interest in film history should see at least once. I'm sure you can find The Terror on Youtube and the Internet Archive.
The Terror gets a C+.
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