Terrified

A bad film, to be sure, but "Terrified!" is an interesting relative of low budget classics like "Carnival Of Souls" and "Dementia". Like "Carnival" it is all set around a spooky location the film makers had access to. This is also a central absurdity of the plot: the town has an abandoned ghost town by a graveyard, but for some reason it seems to be a place where people hang out at night.

Denver Pyle seems to be still learning to act but the actors

do there best with what they are given. Some interesting, if pretentious ideas dance around the script or maybe just pad it out. The sicko killer suggests the darker areas horror would continue to explore in the sixties.

LATER Viewing: I think I really underrated this. It is a strange minimalist horror movie, and it's effect is eerie. Probably made for late night horror show and never shown at the theater (yes, there were such films) Terrified gets under your skin if you give it the chance.

I remember seeing this film on Saturday afternoon TV when I was a kid. One minute I'm watching cartoons, the next some hooded freak is burying a guy in wet cement. I thought it was very spooky with some creepy scenes of the phantom killer creeping around the desolate ghost town. Of course, I was five, so I suppose anyone's attempt at horror would have been considered "creepy" at that age. I've always wondered about this film because, aside from a few random TV viewings as a kid, I've never heard of or seen it again.

Someone in a black suit, tie, gloves, and ski mask and white shirt has buried a young man up to his neck in cement in a cemetery. He taunts him, and the young man snaps. An old man seems to witness the crime.

On the roads, a mystery driver in a mask has been playing his own personal game of chicken with people. He gets off on terror, it seems. Coincidentally another young man is doing a mid-term paper on resisting terror. He'd been a friend of the guy who'd been buried in cement.

The term paper guy's girlfriend wants to talk to Crazy Bill in ghost town, near the cemetery (I guess the filmmakers had a western set they wanted to use). One of the buildings in the ghost town is the Bella Union saloon, which I thought might identify the movie the town was in, or what actual ghost town it might be. Actually, that's apparently a common name for a western saloon.

The girlfriend and her would-be boyfriend go to the ghost town. The boyfriend goes later. There are long scenes, with some suspense, in which the killer stalks his prey, catches it, toys with it, and releases it for more stalking. Unlike other masked killer in horror movies, this one's happy to use a handgun in his arsenal.

Very low budget, but still fairly entertaining. I saw it on DVD in Rhino's Horrible Horrors Vol. 2 box set.

1962's "Terrified" was one of several Crown International pictures that debuted on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater in 1976 (February 19, 1977 to be exact), paired with second feature "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," from 1964. A production whose poverty stricken budget restricts the settings to a deserted Western ghost town and its creepy cemetery, but with a script that would have been commonplace some two decades later during the teen slasher cycle of the early 1980s. Directed by serial veteran Lew Landers, whose prior features included 1935's "The Raven" and 1943's "The Return of the Vampire" (both with Lugosi), a rather fitting conclusion to a busy career as an action specialist, although it cannot claim to be well paced. The idea of a hooded maniac stalking his victims has become quite a cliché since the early sixties, but this appears to be the first horror film that used it. We begin at the ghost town's cemetery with a helpless screaming victim lying in an open grave as his unknown tormentor pours cement over him, driving him insane. Next, we meet our tiny cast in a small coffee shop, who drive back to the deserted cemetery and discover the still warm corpse of the caretaker, obviously a victim of murder. As the young couple drive away to contact the sheriff (Denver Pyle), their friend, Ken Lewis (Rod Lauren, "The Crawling Hand"), inexplicably remains behind, stubbornly facing up to his own fears as he loses just about every scuffle with the hooded killer, who delights in terrorizing his prey, all of whom have close ties to Marge (Tracy Olsen), the sister of the first victim (who has conveniently escaped the asylum to go after his assailant). Once everyone convenes at the ghost town, the film remains just as trapped as the frightened characters, who simply don't behave in the most logical fashion, especially Ken, who seems to be under the impression that the killer is Marge's brother. There is one major subplot that is dropped halfway in, that of a crazed motorist who delights in running people off the road. This is how the sheriff first becomes involved, but nothing ever comes of it, and no explanation is offered as to who it was, except that it's not the character under the hood, an unforgivable sin. The killer's identity is hardly a major surprise, and Italian horror films quickly adopted the idea of a hooded maniac (1964's "Blood and Black Lace"), but it remains an interesting artifact ahead of its time, all but forgotten today. Chiller Theater aired this film three more times as a solo feature, on August 11 1979, July 26 1980, and October 10 1981, with much of the Crown International catalog scarcely seen on the airwaves since ("Twisted Brain" aka "Horror High" lasted the longest, long championed by Elvira).

I was in no way as impressed with this little film as others seem to be. It is definitely a cheap "shocker" about some bizarre plan to eliminate all the loved ones surrounding some dull young teen. Tracy Olsen plays the girl with little depth. Surrounding her are two male suitors - Rod Lauren as a young college student trying to realize what real fear is and the nature of terror and Steve Drexel as the uneducated but loaded with common sense guy. Both do adequate jobs, but this film is just so cheap. Most of the movie takes place in a deserted ghost town with a guy in a mask running around laughing and panting. These scenes are relatively effective and the killer does have an ability to appear menacing, but there are also some ludicrous scenes thrown in and some weird, unexplained stuff, and fantastic leaps of logic needed when the end is revealed. Threading its way throughout the entire story is Tracy's brother may or may not be the killer because he escaped from prison. There is also some guy in a mask running people off of the road. How was that possible when we finally do discover who the killer is? The script wanders and meanders quite a bit and again, the budget is low. But there are some things going for this film. Director Lew Landers does have some tension created in some scenes. I did like the opening scene, and I did think the use of setting was utilized as well as might be expected given the apparent budget. The acting is mediocre at best and poor in general.Do look for a young Denver Pyle as the sheriff, however.