Ring of Terror

As the end credits rolled to the execrable Ring Of Terror the first thing that occurred to me was that it had not succeeded to be any genre of movie at all, and I don't mean that in the good Donnie Darko way either.

The main problem is that it is essentially a Twilight Zone style set-up/payoff story but the film skirts so lightly over the setup (our main character has no fear) that the final pay-off seems utterly unconnected to anything. On top of that the payoff happens so swiftly that there's no dramatic tension at all.

The second problem is the tone. The movie starts off as a horror. Well, if you can class a campy actor looking for his cat (Puma!) in a graveyard while spouting nonsense actually horror. But once the opening credits have played the movie swiftly becomes a teen high school movie, so by the time the climax wrenches the viewer awkwardly back to horror we'd forgotten anything horrible was ever supposed to happen.

All of the other usual b-movie flaws are also evident - the bad acting, incredibly hittable 'comedy' characters, cheesy script. On top of that most of the college kids are played by really old actors. I'm not talking Danny and Sandy old here, these folks are literally in their forties with wrinkles and receding hairlines. It makes it very difficult to get into the story when they're so clearly not college kids.

In short don't think of watching this without the MST3K crew to help you along. It's easily one of the worst I've seen on MST3K.

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?

This is pretty bad, but in the most ridiculous, inconsequential way. Even though it was set in the fifties, the person who put it together must have had no inkling as to how human beings treat each other. This is a mess. You have a bunch of young women dating medical students (the big wage earners of the future) who have a need to party at the "Cafeteria." When the guys get their assignment to view an autopsy, one of the major events in their education, the girls go all ballistic because they were left at the dance. You can't tell the faculty from the students because they are all in their thirties or forties. The main character is traumatized by a fear that his grandfather will jump out of his coffin and throttle him. Let's face it. Ozzie and Harriet was more exciting. The dialogue is atrocious and the believability of the whole thing stretched to the limit. One of the most memorable scenes is the fat guy and his large girlfriend in the bushes, moaning, eating hot dogs. If this isn't Freudian, I don't know what is. It's really a mess, but sort of "mess"merizing.

I'm going to give this three stars just because it is a rare chance to see what has completely disappeared from this earth - the B film made by the small independent making largely drive-in fare with players so anonymous that you wonder why they bothered giving them names in the film different from their actual names. Actually, I think the credits didn't bother after all.

The borrowing from Ed Wood I speak of is an intro - that really drags by the way to the tune of five minutes- and and outro given by a mortuary custodian who recites some stream of consciousness dialogue accompanied by him searching for his cat among the headstones - it reminded me of Criswell in Plan Nine From Outer Space. The custodian finds the cat near the headstone of Lewis Moffett, who died at age 22 according to the engraving. Then starts the flashback of what led to Lewis' demise.

Lewis was a medical student who showed no fear, even when fear would be a reasonable reaction. His fellow students take notice, and the medical student fraternity to which he is pledging (medical student fraternity???) comes up with a hazing device that is sure to reveal if Lewis is just faking it or really is fearless.

The medical students are not just old - but so mixed in age you'd think someone would notice. They seem to range from 20 to 40 years of age. Their girlfriends are always nagging them about their studies getting in the way of their fun, and there is a very long and lame section about a frat party, a beauty contest, the world's ugliest cupid (in diapers), and tons of footage of overweight students overeating. There is an autopsy, oddly performed at night, where apparently the morgue stripped the John Doe corpse naked but left his gold ring on his finger! I thought the black and white cinematography, score, and atmosphere were quite good and set the right mood for a horror film. What the filmed lacked was a decent script with good dialogue, pacing, and acting. The most natural performance was turned in by Puma, the mortuary director's cat. Watch out for that cat, by the way, he actually plays a relevant part in the plot.

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.