(1964)
Dir - Terence Fisher
Overall: MEH
In between several of his average to well-regarded horror vehicles for Hammer Studios in the early 60s, Terence Fisher made the low-budget The Earth Dies Screaming for Twentieth Century Fox. Why he bothered is anyone's guess as the film is remarkably dull. Opening almost exactly as Village of the Damned did four years earlier, it straight-away gets the feel of a rip-off, making the set-up very difficult to come off as hooky as indented. At a mere sixty-two minutes long, it feels quite rushed with all of the would-be compelling details regarding the alien or something menace feeling totally left out. That leaves us with a handful of characters who we are not given enough time with, making everybody's actions seem rather random and uninteresting. The movie never goes anywhere past its initial, very vague premise and even though it gets to the drab conclusion quickly, Fisher hardly has anything to work with to make the movie anything except monotonous. The characters hide, argue, then get along, disappear, turn against each other, and reach conclusions out of thin air and then it is all done and over with before you even notice or worse yet, bother to even care.
(1967)
Dir - Jim O'Connolly
Overall: MEH
Low on gore and sex appeal although occasionally lively at times, most aspects about Jim O'Connolly's Berserk! which are rather a chore to sit through are all similar to the same ones that undid Sidney Hayers just slightly better Circus of Horrors seven years prior. That is, we watch a bunch of proficient, professional circus routines and then every so often somebody gets killed while performing them. At which point, the movie then ends. Joan Crawford is actually pretty restrained and even rather likeable here as the owner/ringleader of the traveling circus, plus Michael Gough has a small yet solid role as well. Both of them bring a bit more class to the proceedings than would be expected. If the word "class" comes to mind when describing Crawford's rather schlocky and final period to her career. The mystery is in fact somewhat intriguing as of course all of the obvious candidates as far as who the hell is murdering everyone cannot possibly be the culprits, leaving one to genuinely scratch their head as to who it is going to turn out to be. Sadly, the answer to this question is as lame as the bulk of the movie is and really outside of Crawford adequately holding down the fort, Berserk! is as forgettable as they come.
(1967)
Dir - Samuel Gallu
Overall: GOOD
This lesser-known staring vehicle for Christopher Lee, Theatre of Death also features Julian Glover, (Indian Jones and the Last Crusade, Doctor Who, The Empire Strikes Back), and Lelia Goldoni, (Hysteria, John Cassavete's Shadows, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), and it is rather stylishly directed by the equally lesser-known American Samuel Gallu. Why the film is not mentioned as often as other such horror works from the 1960s is anyone's guess, but then again as far as Lee was concerned, the man did make about seven hundred such films that decade so it is rather easy to overlook a couple. Lee is perfectly cast as a brutish, egomaniacal theater director and he does everything his expertise allows to make his character thoroughly deplorable. With a script full of silly, implausible coincidences, it must be said that the real hero of the production is Gallu. The director choose to shoot a great deal of the movie with off-kilter angles and handheld camerawork, evoking a cinéma vérité style that is rather refreshing for the somewhat ridiculous, Jack the Ripper-esque plot. By giving it such a visual edge, it makes it more forgivable that the movie drags in a few spots, particularly the ending which gets rather interrupted by a drawn-out voodoo dance sequence that unintentionally deflates the tension.
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