A lot of fun.

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Terrible or Terrifying? This low budget thriller is brought to us from small-time exploitation king Norman J. Warren, the man responsible for such extreme British classics as SATAN'S SLAVE and INSEMINOID. What little plot the film contains is soon ditched as it becomes just another string of gory murders, but on the plus side the film does manage to evoke some scenes of fear and fright.It's strange how much low budget work (take The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for example) manages to be a lot more terrifying than big budget blockbusters, such as recent debacle of THE HAUNTING. Perhaps it's the increased realism of this budgetary-challenged films, which lack the glossiness and shininess of the latest Hollywood release, factors which distance those films from the viewers. TERROR is a hard, depressingly realistic film, where events are played out among sleazy pornography films and characters shout and swear at each other just for the sake of it.The film begins promisingly with a mini-movie, which, like the beginning of Hammer's VAMPIRE CIRCUS, is quite simply brilliant. It shows a witch burning and then returning from the grave to gorily dispatch members of a family. After this a bloody murder ensues, and the film becomes part murder-mystery, but it soon becomes clear that supernatural forces are at work and we are left to sit back and watch the relentless bloodshed. The unknown cast (see if you can spot Sarah Keller from THE BEYOND) all perform well.Most of the murders are imaginative, well-staged and definitely not for the squeamish. One man has a camera crush his head, a woman is stabbed many times and impaled against a tree. A man has his neck slit with broken glass (this film obviously inspired the makers of GHOST) while another girl is bloodily dispatched on a stairway. There is no happy ending here, no release from the deaths. Just murder and mayhem. And yes, the film is scary in places, conjuring the fear of the power of the unknown in much the same way as THE EXORCIST did, using the blood to sicken and repulse the viewer and make him/her beg for release from the horror. On these counts, TERROR is a minor success for the director, little seen and even less heard about, but succeeding well in disturbing the viewer.

Film producer James Garrick (John Nolan) begins to think there is some truth in his family being cursed by a witch when a series of murders start happening in and around an actor hostel. The only person of suspicion is Ann (Carolyn Courage), his cousin and only other living relative. This was Norman J. Warren's second horror film (after 1976's SATAN'S SLAVE) and it is certainly watchable, but definitely strange. That mainly comes from the film's clumsy plot execution, with things going from slasher to supernatural at the 50 minute mark with lots of lose ends. In fact, you never find out who is responsible for the murders in the film's first half. I mean, you can take a guess, but it is never confirmed. The film does benefit from some nice country locations and some bloody murders. There is also a really impressive bit where Ann's car is lifted into the trees while she is still in it. If you have a desire to see it, definitely grab the Mill Creek GOREHOUSE GREATS collection which features it, Warren's SATAN'S SLAVE and 10 other films for cheap (I got it for $5).

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.

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.