(1962)
Dir - Lew Landers
Overall: MEH
This mediocre slasher movie was the final directorial effort from Lew Landers, as well as his first non-television work since 1958's racer musical Hot Rod Gang. A masked killer is rumored to be doing his business in a nearby ghost town, and we are greeted to more than one gruesome buried alive sequence where he throws dirt on a bound victim as they understandably scream and flail in vain, all while the bad guy's piercing eyes widen underneath his disguise. We also see another one of his victims impaled on spikes, all of which provide a surprising level of nastiness for such a low level cheapie that came out in the early 1960s. As is often the case with such B-movies though, Terrified is detrimentally padded and therefor poorly paced. Characters have slow, redundant conversations with each other, wander around, get captured, escape, get captured again, and talk a good boring expository dialog game just to make sure that every viewer is caught up. The killer reveal is an obvious one as well, and despite its aforementioned disturbing sequences which are a scant few, there is little else here to appease genre hounds.
(1966)
Dir - Jack Hill/Stephanie Rothman
Overall: MEH
In the seemingly endless list of Roger Corman financed vehicles that were slapdash efforts of older, often foreign films spliced together with newly shot footage, Blood Bath, (Track of the Vampire), is one of the most legendarily mangled. Corman purchased the rights to an unfinished Yugoslavian spy thriller called Operation: Titian, but he found it to be unreleasable. Therefore, he hired Jack Hill to rewrite and film several new scenes, changing the title to the one that would eventually stick. Yet hilariously, this still was not good enough for Corman, who then had Stephanie Rothman shoot yet more scenes which changed the narrative even further since lead actor William Campbell refused to come back for a third time, forcing the production to explain his character's change of appearance. Oh, and when the movie was sold to television, Rothman added still MORE scenes to pad it out past its theatrically released, sixty-two minute running time. As one could guess, the final result is a mess of continuity errors and narrative confusion, but astonishingly, it is not a complete trainwreck. Some of the sequences are chilling, the performances are decent, and it has an understandable off-kilter charm that mixes Corman's earlier A Bucket of Blood with cinematic vampire and witch trial tropes.
(1969)
Dir - Paul Wendkos
Overall: MEH
The first of two pilots which in turn became television movies for NBC, (the following year's Ritual of Evil serving as the sequel), Fear No Evil is a laborious and slow example of the post Rosemary's Baby boom of occult films which were turned out in droves across continents and with various budgets. Writer/producer Richard Alan Simmons adapted a story by Guy Endore with familiar elements like a cursed mirror and a clandestine black magic cult whose members are essentially bored, financially stable white people looking to summon demons for a hoot. Louis Jourdan plays one of only two characters who appear in each film, a suave psychiatrist who cracks the code of what is going on. Unfortunately, what in fact is going on is horrendously paced and ergo boring. The supernatural sequences are few and far between and not at all creepy when they do arrive, mostly involving Lynda Day George merely staring into a mirror where her recently dead fiance makes out with her. With so much talking revolved around such an uninteresting mystery with formulaic ingredients, there is little here to recommend it above far better works of the era that involved diabolical witchcraft.
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