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.

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.

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.

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 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.