Nightmare at Elm Manor

NIGHTMARE AT ELM MANOR is a fun little 5 minute short from porn purveyor George Harrison Marks. It's incredibly cheap-looking, silent, and shot in black and white, and yet it contains more atmosphere and suspense than you'd expect from what is very much a throwaway production. The storyline is expectedly simple, as a young woman arrives to spend the night at a creepy old mansion and is haunted by a weird-looking butler.

Given the director's pedigree, it's no surprise that the main point of this short is to show off the ample charms of starlet June Palmer who's more than happy to strip off for the camera. She's certainly a comely presence in this low rent effort, and as a whole the sheer scale of weirdness works in its favour. It's a hoot.

Nightmare at Elm Manor (1961)

*** (out of 4)

George Harrison Marks directed this low-budget nudie picture that lasts just five-minutes but it's quite entertaining. A woman is seen walking through the woods and she then walks into a house where she undresses. From here she encounters a strange man who appears to be a vampire. I must admit that I had never heard of NIGHTMARE ON ELM MANOR before watching the director's NAKED AS NATURE INTENDED. I searched the film and found it quite easily and I must admit that it was a good and entertaining five-minutes. The film is pure sexploitation as the woman constantly has her breasts exposed for one reason or another. She's either dressing or undressing and if not then she's running around with her top open or is in the perfect position for them to just fall out. As a sexploitation film that works quite well. As a horror movie I found the editing to be effective and it was nice getting to see a vampire as a sexual character and going after that more than just blood.

OK, so I'm not that much into these kinds of nudie short films, but I ran into this one on YouTube, and I have to say I was impressed.

It's short at only about 5 minutes and silent, but it is fairly well crafted for what it was intended to be. Not sure how this thing was put together, but it looks like someone really liked and respected early horror films. In this little five minutes you see respect paid to James Whale and Tod Browning.

June Palmer is fetching, of course, and Stuart Samuels has the perfect look for the "vampire".

I rated this an eight only because it is so much better than it had to be for a nudie short, and the best one I've run across so far.