September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.
In his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Roger Corman went into detail on this film, an infamous one in his career: “It began as a challenge: to shoot most of a gothic film in two days using leftover sets from The Raven. It turned into the longest production of my career — an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete.”
While Corman is listed as the director, it was also worked on by Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and even Jack Nicholson. It all started with a rained out tennis game, as Corman decided that since the sets were still there for two days and he had access to Boris Karloff. Nobody really knew what the movie would be about, other than to be in a castle, and that Karloff had two days to do his part. The icon of horror had no clue that some of that would be spent in a tank of cold water.
The funny thing is that American-International Pictures paid for the sets for The Raven, but Corman was making this film by himself. He never asked if he could do it. He just started shooting. Samuel Z. Arkoff knew something was happening when at the wrap party, all of the sets were still standing. Then again, he knew that Corman would be coming to him to distribute the movie.
Other directors came in instead of Corman, as this was a non-union job and he was a union director. The beach scenes were shot by Coppola, along with Hill and Gary Kurtz, much of which was unusable as Coppola didn’t tell the cameraman that he was shooting night shots and then he went way over. Eleven days of shooting, which was like two Corman films worth of shooting.
Dennis Jakob shot Hoover Dam for the water scenes — while also working on his thesis film, something Corman couldn’t get angry about, because he was doing the same thing so often — and Monte Hellman and Jack Hill finished the film. Well, then Corman thought nothing worked together and it was boring, so he went back and shot a bunch of new scenes to make the movie work together. In a lot of those reshoots, Jack Nicholson’s wife Sandra Knight is noticeably pregnant when she wasn’t in the early shoots.
Meanwhile, Corman had promised Karloff $15,000 if this movie made $150,000. It didn’t,. but he had another idea. If Karloff would appear in Targets, he would get the cash. Corman told Peter Bogdanovich that he would finance his film if he shot twenty minutes of new Karloff footage, added in twenty minutes of this movie and then shot forty minutes with a new cast. Bogdanovich used footage from this movie at the beginning of his film, as Karloff watches himself and proclaims the movie as terrible.
French soldier André Duvalier (Nicholson) has left his men after a battle gone wrong and is rescued by Helene (Knight), a woman who looks just like the dead wife of a Baron. Twenty years before, after finding his wife with another man, the Baron (Karloff) killed her and had his servant Stefan (Dick Miller) kill the man he found her with.
A witch named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) has been sending the ghost of the Baron’s wife to torment him, asking him to kill himself and join her. That’s because she thinks that the Baron killed her son Eric when the truth — ready for the spoiler — is that Eric killed the Baron and has gone so insane that he thinks that he is the Baron and killed Eric. By the time she learns this, it’s too late to enter the castle and as she runs to save her son, she walks across consecrated ground and burns. Just like Shakespeare, everyone dies except our young lovers, except that Helene is a ghost as well and she turns into a corpse after kissing André.
Speaking of saving money, AIP used to send its composers to more inexpensive European studios. In spite of this movies small budget, Ronald Stein was able to record both this movie’s soundtrack and the score for Dementia 13 all in one session while using the 90-piece Munich Symphony Orchestra. Speaking of that movie, The Terror played double features with it.
So yes, this isn’t a perfect movie, but at least Nicholson has good memories of it, saying “I had a great time. Paid the rent. They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.”
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