Ring of Terror

This murky film with terrible sound looks like it was filmed around 1939. It's about a bunch of geriatric medical students eagerly awaiting their first autopsy. One unshakable elderly boy's creeped-out girlfriend wishes he was studying anything but medicine. So why is she dating guys from med school? Is she going to medical school too? Or is this a college where you can major in being a doctor, with a minor in communications? It's hard to tell, and the women in in this movie don't seem to ever have to go to class.

Anyway, some middle-aged fraternity pranksters make the elderly boy steal a ring off a corpse, an urban legend that should take five minutes to tell and doesn't bode well stretched out to feature length. I'm not going to give away the ending, suffice to say the old man's weak ticker factors into the plot.

To pad out the running time, lots of time is spent dwelling on the two fat characters, exploring the theme that fat people love to eat and should be mocked for trying to do anything other than that. There's also a lengthy intro (and outro) by Bob Dobson, a creepy, cemetery-dwelling loser who stomps on his cat Puma's tale and mocks the dead. He must be the Crypt Keeper before the Crypt Keeper died and rotted and gained a penchant for bad puns.

This is one of those rare horror movies..the ones that try to bore you to death. This movie is one long snooze-fest, as it follows the adventures of an over forty, robotic med student, his ditzy girlfriend, and his 'frat buddies', all also over forty but amazingly childish. Looks like they all got stuck at about the age of eight emotionally.

The film starts out on a graveyard(great place for it), with a skinny caretaker deliberately stepping on his poor cat's tail, this after he'd spent ten minutes calling the thing "Pe-yuma!" he caroled over and over, until the viewer has the urge to reach into the screen and slap him hard. And then he trods on the cat's tail, after he went to all that trouble to find it! All to set up a really stupid scene where he talks about the life of the guy who's tombstone he ends up leaning on after he chased the (rightly) outraged cat through the cheap cardboard tombstones.

The med student who's life and death he details might already have been dead, so wooden and dull is he. Even when he's fishing a six foot rattlesnake out of the back of his car(well, at least it interrupted the incipient make out scene), he never bats an eye or emotes at all. How much Robitussen did this guy drink before he went on set?

This mook wants to join a fraternity at his college(a fraternity for guys over the age of forty but still in school, apparently). As part of his initiation, he has to endure whatever hazing his not very imaginative colleagues come up with. They tell him he has to retrieve a ring off the finger of a corpse, the dead guy being the body they'd seen dissected a few days ago as part of their classes. He goes and does it, but apparently Mr.Nerves of Steel is afraid of enclosed spaces and the dark, and so is scared to death when the corpse's arm brushes his. Lame. We spend sixty minutes wading through the plodding set up for this? This trite, heavy handed 'ironic' ending? Where's John Belushi when you need him?

The actual "plot" of the movie is completely unoriginal so I won't talk about that.

What I get such a kick out of, is the caretaker guy at the very beginning and ending of the film! Mr. Dobson, I think his name was. Someone decided that this guy wandering aimlessly in a cemetery looking for a cat named Puma (i least that's what I think he was saying) would make for a great opening to the film. He finds the cat, steps on it, it runs away, and he begins all over again! It represents the pure incompetence that runs through this film.

Also be sure to look out for the fat couple and a really "funny" frat guy you'll want to kill after watching him for about 10 sec.

Although it is not a very good movie, there are a few things I actually like about this film.

First is the scene with the rattle snake. Believe it or not, this actually scared me the first time I saw it (I was about 40). I hate snakes anyway and a rattler finding its way into a parked car seemed very plausible and unnerving to me. Yikes.

Second is the music which immediately precedes the snake scene. As the Buick convertible pulls up to a Magnolia tree and parks, the students are playing the car radio. I don't know what the name of the song is or the artist, but I absolutely love it—late night mood music. The same recording turned up briefly in "Hideous Sun Demon."

Third is the music heard during the outdoor fraternity party the night the assignments are given out. Several tunes are heard, but this one is clearly the "B" side of the record used for the snake scene. It's by the same group and has the same sexy, late night jazziness about it. It's great.

Fourth is the ending with the ring. Perhaps, like the rest of the movie, it was crudely done. But nevertheless, when the student goes into the mortuary and is sweating it out removing the ring, I felt very tense, just waiting for something awful to happen. It worked for me.

Lastly is the fact that there are some fairly hot guys in the cast, which always brightens things up a bit. I won't name them, you can see for yourself.

Not a great film, but still a few things to like about it.

Life must have been very, very tough in the early 1960s, as the college students in this film look older than me in many cases--and I'm 45! In addition, the 'students' talk very much like a square adult's idea of what 'those crazy kids' should sound like! Frankly, it was a bit embarrassing seeing these middle-aged folks cavorting about and acting like Archie, Jughead and the gang! The focus for this film is on the medical students (most of which look like they will be collecting social security benefits very, very soon). The class is beginning their work on cadavers and they are naturally far from excited about this--except for Moffitt who seems to enjoy the whole thing.

As far as the plot goes, I think my daughter summed it up best near the end of the film when she yelled out "can SOMETHING interesting happen soon?!". The answer, sadly, was NO--at least not until 53 minutes into the film! The film just meanders and is boring beyond belief....and occasionally offensive (such as during the beauty(??) pageant). At the 53 minute mark, there is very bad recreation of an old urban legend about the cemetery and the grave site---but, frankly, at this point in the film, who cares?! Overall, a really dull dud...and nothing happens to justify watching any of this schlocky film.