After watching The Terror, I realized: audiences back in 1963 were much easier to scare. A spooky castle that sits atop a rocky hill against the backdrop of a lightning storm will likely never put the fear an any 2011 movie-goers. I'm not even certain the first twenty minutes of the movie made any clear sense, even to a 1963 audience. Back then, people really must have trusted the film to come together for them at the end. And with a beginning and premise like The Terror's, one would be disappointed if it didn't come together at the end.
Lieutenant Andre Duvalier (Jack Nicholson at around 25 years of age) of Napoleon's French army becomes separated from his regiment and winds up on a beach. He falls off his horse, faints, and wakes up to find a pretty young lady walking along the beach he later discovers is named Ilsa (Sandra Knight). She is distant, silent, but kind of flirty, so Andre is immediately intrigued.
Before Andre can make any moves or get any answers from the reticent Ilsa, he is attacked by a hawk or bird of some sort on the beach. After being pecked to the point of passing out, Andre wakes up in a creepy old woman's cottage who tends to his wounds. The old woman, Katrina (Dorothy Neumann), gives Andre no advice or information on the mysterious woman, but another creepy man in the cottage, Gustaf (Jonathan Haze), tells Andre that he can help this mysterious woman by going to the von Leppe castle and investigating futher there. So he does. And after meeting the Baron, Victor von Leppe (Boris Karloff), Andre still gets no answers to what he wants to find out: who that fly honey was on the beach.
And that's what the central character's motivation truly is for the 80-minute film: "who was that girl on the beach? Because she was totally hot." Andre finds nothing but more people who don't want to talk about Ilsa and deny her existence, but Andre finds more and more proof that people know more than they're saying. Why would they say anything to him? Andre Duvalier is just some soldier who literally walked in out of the blue waving his authority stick around, demanding answers. We have no more reason to care about Andre as we are given a history of Andre. Until his futile actions in the climactic third act, he is utterly useless. It's one movie that unfortunately Jack Nicholson should have been written out of.
The Baron was the only interesting character, and by the end, the only character who mattered. Boris Karloff, who is nothing short of a horror icon, played the Baron with a great level of commitment, and while watching the film, it's clear he is way bigger than this movie.
As for what the "terror" actually is, you're guess is as good as mine. I have a guess as to what the title refers to, but I'm not sure anything can be "terrifying" and "predictable" simultaneously. The "scare factor" on The Terror ranks just below an old episode of Scooby Doo and right above an episode of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Some of the spookier moments consist of candles being extinguished at the sudden opening of a door, a shadow ominously moving across the wall, and birds on the beach that attack at will.
Of course it's a movie from 1963, so it's going to be unintentionally campy by today's standards, but Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho predates The Terror by a few years, and that movie featured one of the most iconic scary moments in film history.
The only way to enjoy The Terror is to do so the same way you would an old, tattered first edition of a poorly written book. It can be appreciated for its age, but content-wise, it's not an easy like, and you'll find that after one viewing, you have better things to do with your time than to ever watch it again.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Apart from a trailer, there's a quick reel of footage that makes side-by-side comparisons of the original 35mm film footage and its digitally restored version.
"The Terror" is on sale April 26, 2011 and is not rated. Horror. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, Jack Nicholson, Monte Hellman, Roger Corman. Written by Leo Gordon and Jack Hill. Starring Boris Karloff, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight.
