maarck6
Saw this movie the first time in the early eighties when I saw it on the all-blackly owned channel 62 in Detroit. A channel that would show huge blocks of movies of all kinds; spirituals, westerns, sleazy horror, mysteries, black and white or color. It just didn't matter. Unfortunately, because of the generic title, this movie was lost for years. I saw it once on VHS then not again for thirty years, then not again until five years late, and now I get to see it again in an excellent print. What can I say about this supernatural slasher? British exploitation at its best with amputation, beheadings, impaling, poltergeistic activity, hypnotism, bloody murder, stabbings, garrotings, full frontal nudity, a s&m stripper, immolation by fire, beautiful English babes, a trans-generational curse, a levitating car, a plot with as much logic as anything by Dario Argente, stiff and bad acting, and Tricia Walsh as a ginger haired ditz who manages to steal every scene she's in. Ghod, what more can you want? Should be taught in film schools. Eight stars because I've never been less than entertained by this movie. A good double feature with Superstition.
dolly_the_ye-ye_bird
Right, so at first I was quite intrigued by this film. The beginning was a bit overdone and campy, but looked promising...B movie promising, that is. Then comes the realization that the beginning scenes are in fact a movie within a movie. Cue the ACTUAL movie. It seems as though the film maker is the descendant of the woman killed by the witch in the film we've just 'watched'. I was slightly intrigued again as this character was played by John Nolan, who I had just seen in an episode of Thriller, In The Footsteps of a Dead Man, from four years earlier which was quite good. Unfortunately, Terror just didn't live up to my hopes. The plot of the family curse by a witch is an old one and, while done well, can make a hell of a film, wasn't done in a convincing manner here in my opinion. The victims of the 'family' curse were mostly random bit players in the film not the 'descendants' who were supposedly 'cursed'. The deaths were nice and gory if you like that sort of thing. Unfortunately I generally don't unless the film is amazing and the gruesome deaths relevant...here, it's not and they aren't. There are many many scenes that just seem to go on for far too long in this film leaving you thinking, "Is this actually GOING somewhere or were they just padding the heck out of this movie?". The answer every time was, "No." and "Yes.", respectively. Then we get to the end...errr, the second 'end'. Literally, left me saying, "That's it? Really? That's the end? Really????
Aaron1375
Yes, about five minutes into the movie it appears to end leaving me a bit surprised. It is not the shortest running movie ever, however, as this is just a film clip made by some producer depicting the burning of a witch who is definitely not wrongly prosecuted and the subsequent curse she put on his family. This is all the plot there is as the rest of the movie seems to be just random shots of people saying stuff, once in a while getting killed by slasher means and then supernatural means, none of the garbled mess making much sense at all except for what the brief movie at the beginning clears up. The only reason I gave this movie a two instead of a one is the nice looking red head that was in the movie, and quite frankly I would have rather saw the movie they were making with her in it involving the bath even as lame as that looked. I just wonder why this movie was made, they had a very light premise set forth and seemed to fill the movie with a lot of filler and not much else as the characters are not developed and at times the film seems to skip from one random scene to another. I have to wonder if the whole movie was made just to feature the strange epileptic blonde stripper in the middle of the movie. The deaths feature some blood and also make me give it a two instead of a one because they are somewhat interesting if not terribly good. All in all I would rather watch "Satan's Slave" another British horror movie that you can see a poster for in this movie.
fertilecelluloid
He didn't make Hammer rip-offs and he didn't make counterfeit Amicus flicks, either. Norman J. Warren created a horror sub-genre instead, and "Terror" is the second best of these while "Prey" is the best. Though this was clearly inspired by "Suspiria" and equally ropey in terms of structure, is is still an entertaining hour and a half.The opening film-within-a-film, a witch burning sequence, has better production values than the rest of this shocker, but it is, nevertheless, a graphic slasher (for its time) that takes some risks. Most of the murders are knife murders and we get lots of knife POV's and a procession of red herrings. A car lifted off the ground and up into a forest canopy shows some creativity and a poor sod impaled on spikes notches another one up for bloody horror.Despite good transfers, the Warren films still look ugly because they were not lit too well. Some of the interiors are overexposed and the hard lighting looks more accidental than planned. The performances range from adequate to somnambulistic (perhaps intentionally) and the electronic score (by Ivor Slaney) is more noisy than musical.Worth seeing, sure, but not anything groundbreaking.
AD
