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Die, Monster, Die! (1965)
Topic Started: Oct 11 2007, 05:57 AM (85 Views)
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Die, Monster, Die!
American International Pictures, 1965
Directed by Daniel Haller

Starring Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, Fred Jackson, and Suzan Farmer

Despite the respite with Monogram, Karloff's stint on the A-list lasted through RKO's Danny Kaye vehicle,The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947. After that, with horror out of vogue in Hollywood, Boris concentrated more on Broadway, achieving considerable success in Peter Pan and The Lark. His occasional films were, as a rule, low-budget bottom-of-the-bill types, although not the depths to which his one-time rival Bela Lugosi had descended. With the surprising success of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948, however, Karloff (who wasn't in that film) was brought back by Universal-International for a pair of sequels starring the comics, plus a few gothic chillers. The rest of the 1950s saw Karloff appearing mainly in a variety of low-budget American and British films for independent producers.

After a five-year absence from the screen, and having seen his horror throne usurped by Vincent Price, Karloff returned to the spook show business courtesy of a new contract with drive-in movie specialists American International Pictures. The teaming of Price and Peter Lorre had proven so popular with Poe's Tales of Terror that Karloff was added and a terror triangle was formed for Roger Corman's The Raven in 1963, with Basil Rathbone thrown in for good measure with Comedy of Terrors (1963, directed by Jacque Tourneur, although many people assume it's Corman's picture). Both were horror spoofs, but the remainder of Boris' AIP career would be straight chillers (save for cameo roles in some of the Beach Party pictures).

Having mined Edgar Allan Poe's vein pretty well, AIP turned to H.P. Lovecraft in 1965, and assigned Karloff to play Nahum Witley, patriarch of a cursed family, in Die, Monster, Die! (adapted from Lovecraft's The Colour out of Space). American TV star Nick Adams is the young hero, who arrives in the town of Arkham looking for his college sweetheart (Suzan Farmer) and finds that she lives with her cranky, deranged scientist father, scarred invalid mother, a butler who appears to be twice Karloff's age, and a greenhouse full of monsters. Not much in the film works, mainly because director Daniel Haller is no Roger Corman and the romantic leads are dull; furthermore, Adams' New York accent is delivered with so little passion that every line of dialog seems to indicate his extreme distaste for the project. Karloff keeps things moving as best he can considering he's in a wheelchair for nearly the entire running time of the film; in the end, he turns into a monster (whose makeup seems to consist of Reynolds Wrap) but that's obviously a stuntman. The plot of the film seems to have been lifted more from Corman's The Haunted Palace than from H.P. Lovecraft, which makes perfect sense if you know that The Haunted Palace was based, not on Poe, but on a Lovecraft tale! In any case, Die, Monster, Die! was not the hit AIP hoped for, and after one more picture with the studio (Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), Karloff's AIP career was over.
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