Where else can you find Ebenezer Scrooge playing a character named Soapy Marx? Or James Bond's Q as someone called Ferdy Fane? And an old house with secret passages, a phony psychic, a criminal genius, and a gang out for revenge? Nowhere else but The Terror, a 1938 potboiler based on the play by Edgar Wallace, one-time king of the British thriller.
Helmed by Richard Bird, an actor who has only one other movie (1938's MEN OF IRELAND) and adapted by William Freshman, perhaps better known -- if at all -- as Lord Hastings in THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL), The Terror is an interesting combination of broad humor and melodramatic thrills ( if not chills).
As far as I can tell, this is a flick you will either love or hate. Which side will you be on?
http://archive.org/details/TheTerror_96
Well, no chance it can be worse than the Corman rush job with no script from the '60s. My first ex appreciated it for the young, trim Jack Nicholson and, less viscerally, for Karloff...
ReplyDeleteNot familiar with this one.
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