Ring of Terror

This film wasn't released until 1962.My guess it was shot no later than 1957 and sat on the shelf for years.Too bad it didn't stay there.

The film centers on a fraternity hazing ritual played on medical students.One student who is seemingly without fear has to remove a ring off of a corpse in a mausoleum.

There are no scares and no real laughs to this flick. What you do have:

1)A band that plays in the school cafeteria called "The Campus Cool Cats"

2)The worlds oldest college students.Most of them looked like they're attending on the GI bill from WW II.

3)Some idiotic cemetary caretaker and his snivelling little cat Puma who introduce the film.Actually it is more like pad an extra five minutes onto the film as he chases the cat all over the cemetary.

4)Nice use of black and white photography

If you have guests or in laws over that can't take the hint to leave, slap this in the vcr and watch them run screaming off into the night.

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.

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.

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.

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.