| Welcome to In The Balcony. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Plus, you'll be eligible for the monthly $1 million prize. (Not really.) Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| The Fear Chamber (1972) | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 26 2007, 08:11 AM (145 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Oct 26 2007, 08:11 AM Post #1 |
|
Look for In The Balcony on Facebook!
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
The Fear Chamber Azteca Films/Columbia Pictures, 1972 Directed by Jack Hill & Juan Ibáñez Starring Boris Karloff, Julissa, Carlos East, and Isela Vega It was never our intention to make this 31-day celebration of the career of Boris Karloff into a "Best of" festival; the man was in movies almost non-stop for half a century, and he made some bad professional decisions from time to time. And he saved some of his worst films for last. It seems that Mexican producer Luis Vergara obtained financing from Columbia Pictures (looking for some sort of a tax dodge, no doubt) that enabled him to film four Karloff movies in Mexico in 1968. Unfortunately, Boris' health prevented that, so his scenes were shot in Santa Monica using a combined American/Mexican crew (although nobody got along much). Producer Jack Hill obtained the footage after Karloff's death in February 1969, and added and manipulated scenes to make the films... well, if not quite admirable pieces of cinematic achievement, at least reasonably coherent and releaseable. The results showed up in 1971: House of Evil, The Incredible Invasion, The Snake People, and The Fear Chamber. Karloff is a scientist whose research team has discovered a rock monster living inside a volcano; in their lab -- in an effort to learn from it -- they feed it the only thing it digests: human fear. Specifically, they bring hookers and strippers to a special haunted house-type "fear chamber" where they terrify them into releasing a fear hormone that the rock thing loves. Eventually, though, its hunger grows and it begins manipulating its human hosts into killing the girls. Boris sometimes interacts with a Spanish-speaking cast (he speaks English) and other times talks to unseen people off-camera ("This is the proudest moment of my career, and all I can do is talk on the telephone!" he says woefully at one point). Often, he seems to be talking to himself. He spends virtually the entire film bed-ridden or in a wheelchair or leaning on a cane. All that said, the movie actually holds up better than anybody could expect (or at least better than I expected), and it has its moments, particularly if you have a sense of humor (and like pretty striptease dancers doing their stuff). This film, incidentally, uses the word "computers" the way B-movies of 1950 use the word "radar": to pretty much encompass the entire field of potential scientific endeavor. The Fear Chamber is available on DVD in a widescreen print from Retromedia Entertainment. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
![]() |
|
| « Previous Topic · Shock Theatre · Next Topic » |





![]](http://z2.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)



12:15 AM Jul 11