5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
If You Like Bad Movies, You Gotta Have This One, December 10, 2005
This review is from: Gallery of Horrors (DVD)
This is another wonderfully ridiculous film that I first came across on Chiller Theater. It was made to cash in on the success of another horror anthology, "Dr. Terror's House of Horror's," but they made it on a cut-rate budget, and it shows. John Carradine, in a bad-fitting tux, introduces five episodes designed to terrify you. At any rate they make you laugh out loud. The tales are as follows: The Witches Clock" (sic), King of the Vampires," "Monster Raid," "Spark of Life," (with Lon Chaney, Jr. as a scientist in the 1880s trying to revive a crazed murderer. Watch for Lon's wristwatch.) and "Count Alucard," a vampire tale starring Mitch Evans as the vampire. He gets to fight a werewolf. (!) Rochelle Hudson, an ingénue at Paramount in the 30s, is in there, too, picking up a pay check and trying to rise above the material.
However, let me give the last word to film critic and author Michael Weldon (The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film): The sets look straight out of a play put on by a rural high school. The script is completely ludicrous. In other words - total entertainment! Don't miss it."
Endorsement like this don't come every day.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
So shocking it will sliver your liver!, February 15, 2006
This review is from: Gallery of Horrors (DVD)
While watching Gallery of Horrors (1967) aka Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors, it brought back memories of the harmless, post-code horror comics I used to read as a kid, specifically titles like "Tales of the Unexpected" and "Secrets of Haunted House", with good reason as most of the stories presented here were based of those by originally written by Russ Jones, author and graphic artist, who worked on such titles as Creepy and EERIE, both released by Warren Publishing. Produced and directed by David L. Hewitt (The Wizard of Mars, Journey to the Center of Time, The Mighty Gorga), the film features the legendary talents of Lon Chaney Jr. (Of Mice and Men, The Wolf Man) and John Carradine (Captains Courageous, The Grapes of Wrath) in roles probably best forgotten in retrospect. Also appearing is Roger Gentry (The Wizard of Mars), Ron Doyle ("Death Valley Days"), Vic McGee (Monsters Crash the Pajama Party), Mitch Evans, who played the gorilla in the classically rotten Jerry Warren feature Teenage Zombies (1959), and Rochelle Hudson, who was the voice of Honey from the Bosko cartoons throughout the 1930s.
After three, arduous, drawn out minutes of opening credits, John Carradine appears in a rented tuxedo, flanked by a still picture of a creepy looking manor, and he provides the set up for our first tale (of five) titled The Witches Clock, a story about a young couple taking up residence in an extremely large and spooky manor (one where the exterior looks exactly like that of the house in the opening sequence of the old Scooby Doo cartoon), once inhabited by a witch, who was killed by her neighbors back in the day when it was fashionable to do such things. In the dungeon (I bet that was a featured selling point), they find an old clock that turns out to be enchanted, and bad things ensue, resulting in a rather abrupt ending. The next tale is title King Vampire, and is set in London in the 1890's, and features a stymied Scotland Yard detective trying to discern the cause of some gruesome deaths about town, ones which involve puncture wounds to the victims' necks, and a severe loss of blood. The third story, titled Monster Raid, includes a scientist whose developed some formula with the intent on unlocking the secrets of the undead returning from the dead to take vengeance on his unfaithful wife and a scheming colleague, both of whom conspired against him in order to steal his secrets, ultimately causing his death. The fourth bit is titled The Spark of Life, and features Lon Chaney Jr. as a science professor and once colleague of Erie Von Frankenstein, who shares his vision with two of his students regarding the re-animating of a cadaver through the use of electricity (gee, I wonder where he got that idea from). Anyway, the students, as a lark, decide to put the Professor's theories to the test by juicing up a handy corpse, and soon the Professor becomes involved. The experiment's a success, sort of, until they learn whom they've actually brought back from the dead. The fifth and final tale is titled Count Dracula, and is a seriously abridged version of Bram Stoker's original story, featuring goofy looking `peasants' in off the rack lederhosen and actor who looks like a sleazy used car salesman playing the Count.
Given the time this film came out, it seems obvious it was created only to try and cash in on the horror anthology genre popularized through the various releases from both Hammer Studios and Amicus (The Studio that Dripped Blood), both of whom knew their stuff a whole lot better than of those who made this movie. The stories here are tepid and tame, comparatively speaking, but do offer some mild fun if you're not expecting a whole lot. The material is pretty flimsy, and the characters like cardboard, but given the limited amount of time dedicated to each tale (the film only runs just over 80 minutes), this didn't surprise me. The real pain here comes from the rotten scripting, and the lousy acting. The dialog is ridiculous, especially so during the King Vampire segment, which was set in 19th century London, as the writer tries feebly to emulate lower class Englishman colloquialisms and mannerisms of speech. This combined with some truly awful cockney accents made for difficult watching. In terms of the acting, seems most of the performers came from television, as when they weren't stepping on their lines, they were looking for them either off screen or on some papers their character just happened to be holding at the time. As far as Carradine and Chaney, neither one had much of a part, but Chaney was looking especially tired and worn out (it's known Chaney Jr. had a real problem with the booze later in his career...yeah, he couldn't get enough of it!), compared to Carradine who looked pretty lively for a man his age. I will say this for Chaney, he did seem to put some effort into his role, despite his probably nursing a hangover throughout and the shoddy nature of the material. As far as the stories themselves, they were all pretty tame (as I mentioned earlier), the weakest, in my opinion, being Monster Raid, if only because it featured no twist at the end, something present in the other four. I'm not saying the twist endings in the others made them great, as they were all predictable as hell, but at least it was something. The Monster Raid bit was tedious, as much of it was told in flashbacks sewn together by 63 scenes of a horse drawn carriage speeding down country roads, supposedly carrying the undead scientist home to seek his revenge, his ghoulish voice played over the footage as if we, the audience, could hear his fiendish thoughts. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd suppose I'd go with Chaney's bit titled The Spark of Life, if only because of Chaney and some unintentional humor throughout. The funniest parts for me here were how he, supposedly once a colleague of Dr. Frankenstein, seemed to believe himself a genius for coming up with electrifying the dead in hopes of inducing life. In terms of the directing, there's really not much to say as all the tales feature a couple of very modest (i.e. cheap) settings, and the camera rarely moves within the context of the scenes. All in all, if you're familiar with code correct, kid friendly horror comics of the 1970s, or enjoy high camp in general, then you'll probably dig on this feature, but if you're expecting some substantial, old school type frights, best skip this one. The film and the release are worth about two stars, but I'm tossing in an extra one for the sake of nostaligia.
Released by Image Entertainment from The Wade Williams Collections, the picture quality, presented in widescreen (2.35:1), non-anamorphic, on this DVD starts off poorly, as the first reel of the transfer element has quite a lot of white specking, but this does get better as the film goes on...there is wear and age element damage present throughout, but I've seen worse. The Dolby Digital stereo comes through cleanly. There are no extras included, but there are chapter stops, for what it's worth.
Cookieman108
By the way, one really funny aspect of the film worth mentioning is whenever it appears we're about to see some real violence or blood (usually at the end of the stories), an animated splash of blood covers on the screen, and we then transition into another tale or sequence. This was about as `special' as the special effects got in this feature.
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