Macabre

A doctor in a small town has done a good job of making himself hated because of his role in the deaths of two sisters. When his daughter disappears and a caller announces that she has been buried alive, will the unpopular doctor uncover the MACABRE scheme, or will the cute little girl die a horrible, frightening death?

Any movie that dares cast the lovable Jim "Mr. Magoo" Backus as the sort of brutish sheriff that Sterling Hayden could have done in his sleep does have something going for it. Any movie that features a slutty rich blind girl (who makes time with the pool boy AND Jim Backus AND our surly doctor hero) has a definite noir appeal. And the attention paid to clocks and the passing of time shows that the director at least has a concept of how a film might generate suspense.

But, a movie with the amount of bad, bad acting this one does, indicates a director perhaps more concerned with the promotion of his movie than the making of it. The logical flaws of the film are really extraordinary, beginning with small things, such as the distance between the small town and its old creepy graveyard, and advancing to the large, such as our hero's steadfast refusal to call the cops. And the final resolution, alas, is more disappointing than surprising. The best thing that can be said about the "promotional" aspects of the film -- mostly a rather campy opening announcement about how really truly scary all this is going to be, and a Charles Adams - like animated closing credit sequence, is that these campy things really don't get in the way.

Worth seeing, because the Jim Backus performance is the sort a revelation that can happen when a good character actor is totally cast against type. But the world won't come to an end if you miss this.

I dragged my mother to the Cedar Movie Theater in Minneapolis to watch a triple feature horror show. There was a casket in front of the theatre. I wonder where they got that. The Attack of the Crab Monsters was one film; this one was the second; the third I can't remember. She slept through all three. I was only 10 at the time. We had seen the hype for this on TV. Lloyds of London, a million dollars, all you had to do was to die of fright. Anyway, what turned out to be a pretty average movie with the "buried alive" thing at the center wasn't nearly as interesting as those talking crustaceans. This is really a police mystery. It does have atmosphere. There is a lot of rain. Why do these graveyard things always have so much rain? It is suspenseful at times but terribly talky as well. At my age, seeing a corpse was pretty frightening. When I had a chance to see it again about thirty years later, it really seemed ordinary.

For whatever reason, "B" movie film-maker (of mainly epic, Western and noir fare) Castle changed pace here with a horror outing, whose box-office performance encouraged him to largely stick to this genre thereafter – aided, to a considerable degree, by the showman-like gimmicks which accompanied most of them (in this case, it was insurance against death-by-fright)! Anyway, being the first of its kind, one can perhaps excuse its essential naivete': for one thing, it is not the least bit scary, though the plot of a race-against-time to literally unearth a missing child seemed intriguing enough…

The film – watched via a Czech TV screening sporting obtrusive subtitles in that language, not to mention an excessively hiss-laden soundtrack! – evokes the small-town atmosphere so redolent of its ilk, where skeletons in the closet abound (usually relating to an eminent family) and people bear a grudge (often of a romantic kind) which naturally spells disaster before long. So far, so good: only the narrative does not sufficiently engage the viewer – much less elicit sympathy for its myriad characters – throughout! Indeed, it is rendered even more awkward by being padded (despite being a mere 68 minutes in length!) with flashbacks that seem to make no real point other than to expose the sordid details of some of the main character's personal lives. Acting, too, leaves a lot to be desired – with perhaps the major culprits being the patriarch, always on the verge of expiring from a cardiac arrest, and the leading lady, who melodramatically faints while listening to a purportedly maniacal phone-call (only very briefly heard via a recording at the climax) and is then made to clumsily describe it to the hero! Indeed, the most notable – and effective – cast member is Jim Backus, who gets to physically assault the male protagonist following the death at childbirth of the latter's wife (a doctor, he had preferred spending time with his girlfriend rather than see to his marital and professional duties!) and the former's own ex-flame.

In the end, the movie deserves its pride of place as a trend-setter (the villain's identity, at least, proves audacious if hardly sensible), which the director invariably improved upon in subsequent forays down the path of ghoulish chills – a number of which I will be checking out presently on the occasion of his centenary

William Castle's first excursion into the horror genre is not really scary at all. It's a mild murder mystery about several dislikable characters, one of them presumably having committed a grizzly crime. It gets bogged down midway with some flashback sequences which really don't help the narrative THAT much. The performances are well acted and the film manages to keep a decent level of intrigue and curiosity throughout. It's also unusual to see Jim Backus in a rather unlikable role. However, being advertised as a "horror" film, it fails to provide enough ample shocks to please in that department and it lacks some of the chills and humorous touches of Castle's later work. Still, it's worth a look as the first of the William Castle "gimmick" films.

William Castle, the Sultan of Schlock, proudly presents a movie so horrifying that you might want to take out life insurance before watching! The young daughter of a man with enemies disappears and a mysterious caller reveals that the girl is buried alive with only enough air for five hours. The frantic search begins, the clock on the funeral parlour marks the passing time, and everyone is a suspect. I lived through the movie but, as requested by Castle himself (in a brief voiceover epilogue), won't reveal the ending. If you don't think about it too hard the plot is interesting (although the climactic revelation generates as many questions as it answers), there are some effective scenes as people desperately search for the girl in the creepy local cemetery, and some of the characters quite intriguing (notably, the fast-living blind girl). Stick around for the amusing credit sequence (including typos).