Terrified
Written by Richard Bernstein
Directed by Lew Landers
Ken...Rod Lauren
Dave...Steve Drexel
Marge...Tracy Olsen
Somebody in a black ski mask is terrorizing the area surrounding a ghost town: his actions include running people off of the road in his car, entombing people alive in cement, and impaling caretakers like Crazy Bill on fence posts. Young innocent restaurant hostess Marge and her two suitors, Dave and Ken, find themselves in the thick of it when they venture out to the ghost town in search of answers, and three of them become the masked man's next targets.
Ken is writing a psychology midterm paper on how much terror the human mind can take before it breaks...so maybe he will get some good research out of this ordeal at the very least.
Hmm...a masked mystery man haunting an abandoned ghost town? Let me guess: he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids! Terrified's director Lew Landers seems as if he was impersonating William Castle impersonating Alfred Hitchcock adapting a script from Scooby Doo, Where Are You? But I'd much rather be watching any Scooby Doo episode, any Castle flick, or any Hitchcock film than this steamer.
The filmmaker's tried hard to take a psychological approach to horror, but it falls flat--it's just too heavy-handed in execution. It also doesn't help that there is entirely too much talking and walking for its own good, which only slows down the pace of this already slow film. In fact, the only interesting thing about this entire movie is that it bears striking similarities to the slasher film, which wouldn't really be born for at least another decade.
Well, that and the fact that the killer tries to bury someone alive in the shallowest grave I have ever seen. It's supposed to be six feet under, not six inches! Kind of the earthy equivalent of drowning in a tea spoon of water, isn't it?
1963
Not Rated
80 Minutes
Black & White
English
United States
--J/Metro
