Terror is pretty cool, but also pretty confusing. The story seems relatively simple: witch's curse from centuries ago cause havoc and murder in the lives of a film producer and his actress cousin in present day 1978. But the way it plays out just kind of makes you scratch your head. It's not *totally* out there, but there are enough questions that you kind of have to wonder just how much director Norman J. Warren is intentionally eschewing common sense. I mean, how does this curse manifest itself? And who exactly is it going after? Giving it away would spoil the fun... and it really is a great deal of fun - especially the last half-hour where things get a little kooky.
Terror starts off with a nice title sequence (brightly colored stills from the film, and a broken, bleeding title), and segues into the story of the witch that was burned at the stake centuries ago. Some evil stuff goes down while she's getting burned, showing that she truly has dark forces on her side. After the witch burns, she somehow reincarnates, randomly showing up in the Queen's (?) house. She puts a curse on future generations of her bloodline ("every male and female of your line is damned!"), and then cuts off the Queen's head with a giant sword. We're off to a good start!
But, in an interesting twist, this prologue is actually just a movie within a movie - and we are at the wrap party! We are introduced to film producer James Garrick (John Nolan), when his buddy asks "why would anyone want to watch a movie about your family?" another friend asks, "Is it really true?" James answers, "Yes, it happened here in this house... and that's the sword that killed many of my ancestors... if the stories are true." It's an easy way to introduce (a) the curse, and (b) that he's one of the affected ones. But it's ONLY a movie, right? It turns out that there is just one other surviving Garrick, James' cousin Ann (Carolyn Courage). Ann is a struggling actress who is also hanging out at the party, but things quickly take a turn for the worse when Ann is hypnotized as a party trick. The jokester who hypnotizes her can't get her to snap out of it, and she grabs the big sword and tries to take out James. He escapes with just a scratch (Ann isn't very good with a sword), and manages to get Ann to snap out of it with a quick slap to the face. But evil things are unquestionably afoot. During Ann's hypnosis, several windows in the house were mysteriously broken. And later that night, one of her actress friends is brutally murdered by and unknown assailant. More and more people in James & Ann's social circle start to turn up dead.
Now, normally this is where I'd say something along the lines of "Ann and James must work together to find out what is going on." But Terror isn't that kind of movie. It has a hard to define wierdness to it, and it doesn't really follow your accepted rules of storytelling. So no, they don't try to figure out what is going on, and the film just sort of bops around from supporting character to supporting character for a bit. Ann and James seem content to just stand idly by and wait for the curse to come to them. They are really pretty passive as far as main characters go, and there's this odd section in the middle where we focus more on Ann's job in a Gentleman's Club than any sort of curse/murders/whatever. But it's the sort of loose commitment to storytelling rules is what makes Terror fun. Confusing at times, but fun. Unfortunately, I can't really get into any more specifics without spoiling too much.
Horror-wise, there's some decent stuff here. There's a fair amount of nice attack scenes. The blood has that distinct 70s red paint vibe to it, but at least there's a lot of it. Especially when you consider that the killer seems fond of stabbing people in the legs/feet for whatever reason. There isn't a lot of tension in the film - while I think Warren was probably trying to make a moody/atmospheric film, things just don't look good enough for it to make much of an impression or have much visual flair. The lighting isn't great, and the whole thing just looks kind of bland. Honestly, once you get past the murder scenes, the whole thing just feels more goofy than anything. And the characters will sometimes act in pretty abnormal/unbelievable ways. I think it's less of a "poor-script" issue and more of the fact that they are trying to obscure the identity of the killer. Which I guess ultimately is a "poor-script" issue, but still.
A lot of the online reviews (on imdb) were ragging hard on the music, but I was kind of into it. It's a pretty simple synthesizer deal... it never really feels like a score though. More like something that just adds a little texture here and there. It's not something I would listen to on it's own necessarily, but it adds to Terror's bizarro charm.
So overall I dug Terror. It's not a tight film by any means, and it's not quite weird enough, or technically sound enough, to have a cult following. A little more of one or the other though? Who knows. To me, it feels like a "near miss" as far as cult films go. But it's still off-kilter fun, and passes the time pretty well.
I would recommend this film.
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