Die, Monster, Die!

Die, Monster, Die! begins, 1965-style, with swirling psychedelic colors with the credits projected over them, and ends with Boris Karloff becoming a weird radioactive fallout boy. In between, Nick Adams arrives from America, and, just as in every other horror story dating back to at least 1897 and Dracula, is warned off of going to "that cursed place" by local villagers who drink imitation German beer out of imitation German beer steins.

The flick itself is rather slow and dull. Boris is appropriately spooky and stern as Nick Adams's girlfriend's father, Nahum Witley, whose own father was an inveterate black magician or Satanist (we get shots of a goat's head with a pentagram in the center), and whose haunting visage glowers spookily down from some painting borrowed from an old episode of "Night Gallery."

Suzan Farmer plays Adams's young girlfriend, a basic stock performance from the Sixties scream queen. Freda Jackson, her facially veiled and sitting behind a filmy veil mother is sort of eerie and pathetic, and we already guess she's hideously ugly on one side of her face, for some horrific reason.

A hooded, cloaked figure appears at the window. A butler dies mid- butlering, and Adams ("Stephen Reinhardt") asks about a weird burned-over spot ("the Blasted Heath" one supposes) where everything loos charred. He and Farmer discover the weird glowing greenhouse where everything, all the plants, and some animals, are grown to terrific size. He discovers a radiation machine and a box with a piece of glowing meteorite rock in it, and [puts two and two together awful quickly.

Old Nahum has been cursed with the same evil curiosity as his devil-worshipping daddy: he's been experimenting with the "Color Out of Space" to quote the title of the H.P. Lovecraft story this cinematic milestone is supposedly based on. Hence, one supposes the swirling LSD color-fest at the beginning of the picture, which must have delighted and entertained stoned and bored hippies who went to see this picture when the Free Music Fest in the local park got rained out. Or some such.

We could do you a grand disservice and give you more than this, but then, why would you watch the picture? (Why you would sit through the whole thing once you've started it, well, that's another question altogether). Suffice it to say there's a fiery climax, just as in Bride of Frankenstein (1941), another picture that Boris starred in, one that is about a thousand thousand times better than Die, Monster, Die!

There is one cool shot of a bloody woman's bloody face melting bloodily. Her face is kind of rotting too, which adds an extra fillip of pleasurable viewing for me, personally.

Now, I'll also add (so I can make a 600-word word count) that I don't recall any of this from H.P. Lovecraft's story, "The Color Out of Space." I guess The Old Man of Providence might be a hair or two upset realizing so many bad movie versions of his august works have been filmed and screened, veritably foisted upon unsuspecting moviegoers, all of whom thought they were getting the REAL DEAL. No dice. The best of them, such as ReAnimator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) at least entertaining, fun films to watch. There's something rather dull, mediocre, and predictable about Die, Monster, Die! (and, by the way, to which monster, in particular, is the title referring?), and, as a film critic cum self-appointed expert on damn near everything to do with cinematic art and taste, and a knowledgeable, nay, a veritable encyclopedia of bad movie knowledge, I just find that to be, as all the kids say, PROBLEMATIC.

But hey, good or bad, it still has Boris Karloff in it, even if he's only giving a stock performance, and well, that's a horse of a different color. (A phrase that may not make sense to end this little review with, but which I felt compelled to squeeze in anyway. C'est la vie!)