Terror (1979)

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Terrible or Terrifying? This low budget thriller is brought to us from small-time exploitation king Norman J. Warren, the man responsible for such extreme British classics as SATAN'S SLAVE and INSEMINOID. What little plot the film contains is soon ditched as it becomes just another string of gory murders, but on the plus side the film does manage to evoke some scenes of fear and fright.It's strange how much low budget work (take The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for example) manages to be a lot more terrifying than big budget blockbusters, such as recent debacle of THE HAUNTING. Perhaps it's the increased realism of this budgetary-challenged films, which lack the glossiness and shininess of the latest Hollywood release, factors which distance those films from the viewers. TERROR is a hard, depressingly realistic film, where events are played out among sleazy pornography films and characters shout and swear at each other just for the sake of it.The film begins promisingly with a mini-movie, which, like the beginning of Hammer's VAMPIRE CIRCUS, is quite simply brilliant. It shows a witch burning and then returning from the grave to gorily dispatch members of a family. After this a bloody murder ensues, and the film becomes part murder-mystery, but it soon becomes clear that supernatural forces are at work and we are left to sit back and watch the relentless bloodshed. The unknown cast (see if you can spot Sarah Keller from THE BEYOND) all perform well.Most of the murders are imaginative, well-staged and definitely not for the squeamish. One man has a camera crush his head, a woman is stabbed many times and impaled against a tree. A man has his neck slit with broken glass (this film obviously inspired the makers of GHOST) while another girl is bloodily dispatched on a stairway. There is no happy ending here, no release from the deaths. Just murder and mayhem. And yes, the film is scary in places, conjuring the fear of the power of the unknown in much the same way as THE EXORCIST did, using the blood to sicken and repulse the viewer and make him/her beg for release from the horror. On these counts, TERROR is a minor success for the director, little seen and even less heard about, but succeeding well in disturbing the viewer.

Right, so at first I was quite intrigued by this film. The beginning was a bit overdone and campy, but looked promising...B movie promising, that is. Then comes the realization that the beginning scenes are in fact a movie within a movie. Cue the ACTUAL movie. It seems as though the film maker is the descendant of the woman killed by the witch in the film we've just 'watched'. I was slightly intrigued again as this character was played by John Nolan, who I had just seen in an episode of Thriller, In The Footsteps of a Dead Man, from four years earlier which was quite good. Unfortunately, Terror just didn't live up to my hopes. The plot of the family curse by a witch is an old one and, while done well, can make a hell of a film, wasn't done in a convincing manner here in my opinion. The victims of the 'family' curse were mostly random bit players in the film not the 'descendants' who were supposedly 'cursed'. The deaths were nice and gory if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately I generally don't unless the film is amazing and the gruesome deaths relevant...here, it's not and they aren't. There are many many scenes that just seem to go on for far too long in this film leaving you thinking, "Is this actually GOING somewhere or were they just padding the heck out of this movie?". The answer every time was, "No." and "Yes.", respectively. Then we get to the end...errr, the second 'end'. Literally, left me saying, "That's it? Really? That's the end? Really????

I confess to liking cheap 1970's horror films but this was to bad even for me. The descendent's of a noble family are picked off one by one by a witches curse. Same old story line nobody believes in the curse except one man. For some reason minor characters with no connexion to the family end up being killed. As in most of these films lots of beautiful women being killed, lots of swearing, bit of nudity lots of pointless scenes lots of actors you never heard of and will never see again. Why do people in danger run in to the woods or upstairs instead of back to the house they just came from?Watch it if you have nothing to do and want a laugh.

He didn't make Hammer rip-offs and he didn't make counterfeit Amicus flicks, either. Norman J. Warren created a horror sub-genre instead, and "Terror" is the second best of these while "Prey" is the best. Though this was clearly inspired by "Suspiria" and equally ropey in terms of structure, is is still an entertaining hour and a half.The opening film-within-a-film, a witch burning sequence, has better production values than the rest of this shocker, but it is, nevertheless, a graphic slasher (for its time) that takes some risks. Most of the murders are knife murders and we get lots of knife POV's and a procession of red herrings. A car lifted off the ground and up into a forest canopy shows some creativity and a poor sod impaled on spikes notches another one up for bloody horror.Despite good transfers, the Warren films still look ugly because they were not lit too well. Some of the interiors are overexposed and the hard lighting looks more accidental than planned. The performances range from adequate to somnambulistic (perhaps intentionally) and the electronic score (by Ivor Slaney) is more noisy than musical.Worth seeing, sure, but not anything groundbreaking.