BY THE mid-1960s, Boris Karloff was the living embodiment of the old theatrical trooper.
Suffering from an ailing back that led him to deliver most of his roles from a seated position and tormented by other health issues that would have stopped a man half his age, he soldiered on into his 80s fronting plenty of films - most of which were undeniably not worthy of his talent - and popping up every once in a while on TV shows like The Man From UNCLE as a kind of ‘cool ghoul’ from a long-lost Hollywood golden era.
Mostly, these movies and occasional TV gigs amounted to little more than half-baked nods to those glory days when he was a foundation stone of the Universal monster cycle (which had peaked in the 1930s, lest we forget) and required little of the Surrey-born actor.
Die, Monster Die! - out now on Blu-rayYou shouldn't have come down here! Boris Karloff, Nick Adams and Suzan Farmer star in Die, Monster Die! Out now on Blu-ray. https://theb.fi/46cIVcZ
Posted by BFI on Monday 22 July 2024
Away from the echoes of Frankenstein and The Mummy, though, the odd interesting role did occasionally pop up on Karloff’s impressively full itinerary, allowing him to stretch out a little and deliver something a tad outside his horror comfort zone. Die, Monster, Die! from 1965 is one such offering.
A strange, otherworldly attempt to capture the downright odd writings of HP Lovecraft on film, without actually spending much money, it’s a bizarre little curio that deserves a little long overdue critical love. As it’s just about to be reissued on Blu-ray as part of the BFI’s ever fabulous Flipside imprint series celebrating the darker corners of cult cinema, perhaps that time for a little loving re-evaluation is now.
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Directed by former Roger Corman art director Daniel Haller and shot in England on the kind of budget that most big movies would allocate for catering, it’s not the most illustrious production of the decade to boast the actor’s iconic name - for that you’d probably have to turn to Peter Bogdanovich’s brilliant Targets from 1968 - but it’s still well worth revisiting all the same.
Taking Lovecraft’s tale The Colour Out Of Space and twisting it into a quasi-psychedelic study of madness and mania, Haller crafts a strange little fable that’s low on plot but high on visual style.
Nick Adams stars as American scientist Stephen Reinhart, who arrives in the quiet English village of Arkham at the request of his fiancé Susan (Suzan Farmer). When he gets off the train, he finds the locals won’t speak to him, and transport up to the old house is non-existent.
Once he makes his way through the barren countryside, he finds Susan’s father (played by a wheelchair-bound Boris) scowling at him and her mother bedridden in an upstairs room. Something very odd and unsettling is going on, and the visitor must get to the bottom of it before the lurking unseen evil takes over for good.
Adams is as bland as you’d expect from a generic Yank in a British film, Farmer gets to do little but scream occasionally, and Freda Jackson is underused as the rarely seen mother - but Karloff is immaculate as always, glowering at all concerned and exuding an air of old school menace that makes it all worthwhile.
