Folter

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Juan Ibanez and Jack Hill; Produced by Luis Enrique Vergara, for Azteca Films, released in America by Columbia Pictures. Screenplay by Luis Enrique Vergara and Jack Hill; Photography by Raul Dominguez and Austin McKinney; Edited by Felipe Marino; Music by Enrico Cabiati; Dialogue Director: Stillman Segar. Starring: Boris Karloff, Julissa, Isela Vega, Carlos East, Sandra Chavez and Eva Muller.

Silly sci-fi/horror exploitation film, integrating some of Karloff's last live-action footage into an incredible plot. Vega plays a fellow mad scientist who with big K is feeding a living volcanic rock blood from busty young women after scaring them in the title area. Oddly, Vega's famous frame is kept under wraps until her finale, being fed to the rock herself. Wide-angle lenses and flashy lighting effects do not hide the absence of development in the subplot of rocks from the center of the earth trying to learn to survive on the surface and take over.

If you like old and strange movies this is your movie.Boris Karloff commands a group of scientists who finds an monster into the volcano. Experiments are made to understand this monster who converts fear in feed, but the monster is a rock!! Very good(?)!

I recently bought a Boris Karloff DVD collection, containing four of Karloff's infamous last movies on two DVDs: "La Muerte Viviente" aka. "Snake People", "House Of Evil" aka. "Dance Of Death", "The Incredible Invasion" aka. "Alien Terror" and "The Fear Chamber" aka. "The Torture Zone", all of them directed by Juan Ibánez and Jack Hill.

I was prepared for extremely trashy stuff, but after watching the extremely crappy, but extremely hilarious "Snake Peolple" I was sure I had found the epitome of a 'so bad it's good' kind of movie (I already wrote a review). Then I watched "The Fear Chamber", just to find out it is even a better example for how great awfulness can really be.

Horror icon Boris Karloff's very last movie, "The Fear Chamber" was released in 1972, three years after Karloff's death. Not only am I a big Boris Karloff fan, but I also have utmost respect for Director Jack Hill for his great exploitation classics (like "Coffy" with Pam Grier for example). If you are a fan of unintentional comedies, "The Fear Chamber" should be your kind of movie.

Near the earth's core, scientists discover a rock that is obviously alive! Hoping that the rock will reveal "all secrets of the universe", they bring it to a laboratory to examine it. But since the living rock feeds on human fear, they have to torture young women in a special fear chamber, in order to gain fear hormones and keep the rock alive.

"The Fear Chamber" is an extremely poorly produced flick and apart from Karloff and Isela Vega (who played Warren Oates' girlfriend in Sam Peckinpah's surreal masterpiece "Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia"), the acting is pretty bad too. The lab and the attached fear chamber look extremely ridiculous and resemble of the Ufo in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space". The movie's crappiest (and most hilarious) aspect, however is its script, especially the dialogue. The head scientist Dr. Carl Mendel (Karloff) assumes, for example, that the living rock could reveal "all secrets of the universe" and "the secret of our very existence", although none of the scientists seems to have the slightest reason to make such an assumption.

This may be one of the crappiest Sci-Fi Horror flicks ever, but it is also one of the most hilarious unintentional comedies I have ever seen. The great Boris Karloff makes anything worth watching, this, however, also has a big value for it is probably one of the most absurd movies ever, and for its (unintentional) fun factor. If you had fun watching "Plan 9 From Outer Space", I can guarantee that you will laugh your ass of watching this. Very bad, But I loved it!

One of those dreary Mexican productions that Boris Karloff made toward the end of his career, "The Fear Chamber"'s only attraction for the great but now aged and ailing star must have been the paycheck. The plot, already described elsewhere, is ludicrous, the set looks like somebody's basement, and the effects are cheap.

It's always worth seeing Karloff, but otherwise the only attraction is the supporting cast which includes various beautiful women, including Isele Vega (best known for "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia"), who are called upon to add some sex to the mix. The lesbian scenes make no sense within the context of the story, but they may at least prevent you from fast-forwarding to the conclusion.

Five days ago, House of Evil replaced The Invisible Menace as Boris Karloff's worst film. Today, House of Evil was just replaced by Fear Chamber(viewings of The Snake People and The Invisible Invasion are pending as of now, hoping they are a little better). The only halfway decent thing about Fear Chamber is Boris Karloff, he doesn't have a lot to work with but he still delivers with conviction and dignity which is more than the material deserved. The rest of the acting is atrocious, especially from Isela Vega and Yerye Beirute, the latter bringing unintentional humour to his part. The production values are amateurish, the photography really does look as though it was shot in a matter of days, the effects are slipshod and the sets look like the film was shot in a basement. The music is at best shrill, though a marginal improvement over the music for House of Evil, at least it isn't as annoying. The biggest failings are the script and story. The script often doesn't make sense and written and delivered in such a wooden, stilted way. The story is just as incoherent, laboriously paced and more uncomfortably weird than creepy or suspenseful(and there was me thinking The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Zombies was weird). All in all, love and have a lot of respect for Karloff but Fear Chamber was just awful. 1/10 Bethany Cox