Friday, October 22, 2010

31 Days Of Horror: Day 22: The Unseen #42: The Premature Burial



Why’d I Buy It?: Came with the Roger Corman Boxset I purchased.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: It’s a Corman Poe picture that doesn’t star Vincent Price. Which is like Bruce Springsteen without the E Street Band. Yes The Ghost Of Tom Joad is a very nice album, but no one’s is ever going to confuse it with Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Tunnel Of Love.

How Was It?: Well, better then I expected in segments, and worse in others.

The story as you might have surmised from the title, follows Ray Milland playing a man with a morbid fear of being buried alive. The film is called The Premature Burial, no points for guessing what happens.

I don’t think anyone would argue terribly strenuously, if I said that this is the least of Corman’s Poe Films. It lacks both the frenzied lurid intensity, hallucinogenic color saturated style and strange unearthly beauty of The House Of Usher, Tomb Of Ligeia, and The Masque Of The Red Death. Only Milland’s perfunctory “Drawings O’ Satan” really even wave in this direction.

Furthermore, Milland, though a fine actor in his own right just doesn’t quite hit that same wavelength of melodrama without camp that Price maintained throughout The Poe films.

Worse, the film is narratively disjointed, even for a Corman film. Though all of the Poe Picutures had to leap through all sorts of odd narrative hoops in order to drag their twenty to thirty page source materials into feature length. The Premature Burial takes this to the extreme.

It’s understandable, unlike the other Poe storys which at least give small opportunity to expansion, there’s really not much to deal with in original The Premature Burial. A fellow is buried, it’s a touch premature, he deals with the consequences of this. Oh hey it turns out he was actually on a ship, and just randomly lost his shit. Have fun turning that into 90 minutes, with a poster to bring in the drive in crowd.

So yeah, there’s a whole bunch of filler. Milland builds an elaborate premature burial proof tomb, just so he can destroy it in the subsequent scene. Dark family secrets are disclosed just so they can be forgotten. Long elaborate hallucinogenic nightmare scenes take place just so the film can get that much closer to feature length. Etc. Etc.

This unpredictable plotting ends up being the film’s secret weapon when (minor spoilers) the film, apropos to nothing suddenly morphs into “Raymond Milland’s Badass Revenge” (AKA Ray Milland Brings The Pain) in its last fifteen minutes. Dishing out some a Bride level of hurting bombs to all how have injured and annoyed him over the course of the runtime.

That’s fucking badass.

The Premature Burial belongs to that odd class of movies, that I can’t recommend but would never dissuade anyone from seeing. While there’s a lot that doesn’t work, there’s a lot that does, including the burial itself and the afore mentioned final fifteen minutes. It probably works best when viewed as a variation on Corman’s Poe films, which in all fairness is exactly what it is and will probably play best with foreknowledge of said same.

It doesn’t work in the usual ways, but it works in some very unusual ones.

3 comments:

stonerphonic said...

as bizarre as this is gunna sound, that flick holds a special place in my heart.

it's pretty much my very first horror movie memory as a kid, from the very early 70's. i was being looked after by my maternal grandmother when this featured as the midday horror movie. it was before i was of school age, if that's an indicator of how young i was.

and it frightened the crap outta me. not so much the "horror", coz i don't think there is much horror per se, but the thought of being buried alive is the "chill factor" for me. and it stuck for ages...

until Trilogy of Terror found its way to the midday horror movie slot. Karen Black and that damn Zuni fetish totally replaced being buried alive for "scary" to an under 5!

Samuel Wilson said...

Here's a similar story to yours, Bryce. I've had Premature Burial for several years, as the B-side to Masque of the Red Death and still haven't watched it, probably for the same reasons as yours. You inspire me to finally give it a chance.

Bryce Wilson said...

@ stonerphonice: Geez the grave diggers alone would have been traumatic.

@ Sam: I'll interested to know what you think. Especially of the ending.