The Terror

"For a ghost she's a very active young woman."

With Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson (at a young 26 years old), Roger Corman directing, and Francis Coppola producing, The Terror looks extremely promising. It's rumored to have been filmed in the few spare days Corman had after his completion of The Raven, using the same cast and set, almost as an afterthought. Corman is known for this sort of no-seriously-we-can-fit-another-movie-in work, and as I haven't read his autobiography, I can't say if it's true or not. I can say that The Terror feels like the sort of thing your college film club might have put together before striking the set of a period drama done as a required final project for their theater class. The movie follows Jack Nicholson's character (a French soldier inexplicably wandering without his regiment and without much concern for his military responsibilities) as he searches for the identity of a ghostly young woman who appears seemingly to him alone. For no clear reason, he wears his full uniform through most of the movie, and it looks exceedingly uncomfortable. The pacing is sort of...aimless; there's never any real terror, mostly a lot of meandering boredom and the kind of empty space that allowed Chris the time to speculate on the influence of naumachia on Corman's use of special effects (there is one notably exceptional scene, in which a folksy old woman chants "TETRAGRAMMATON" over a hand-cranked rotating rainbow lamp, finally shouting the name ERIC to music so ominous it seems to have been excerpted from another film, or at least intended for another name). In lieu of real excitement there is some genuinely confusing revelations of identity, the sort of wacky mix ups that occur in the hustle and bustle of killing. Overall this is as mundane as infidelity, murder, the undead, and amnesia get.
[Photo: not so active after all]