Cast:
Ray Milland (Guy Carrell), Heather Angel (Kate Carrell, Guy's Sister), Hazel Court (Emily Gault, Guy's Wife), Alan Napier (Dr. Gideon Gault), Richard Ney (Miles Archer), John Dierkes (Sweeney), Dick Miller ("Mole"), Clive Halliday (Judson), and Brendan Dillon (Clergyman)
Produced and Directed by Roger Corman (#368 - The Little Shop of Horrors, #684 - It Conquered the World, #852 - The Terror, #931 - Not of This Earth, #1007 - Attack of the Crab Monsters, #1039 - Five Guns West, #1042 - War of the Satellites, #1136 - Gas-s-s-s, #1147 - X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes, #1186 - A Bucket of Blood, #1423 - The Wild Angels, #1425 - The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, #1674 - Machine-Gun Kelly, #1684 - Creature from the Haunted Sea, #1918 - House of Usher, #2030 - The Trip, #2113 - The Undead, #2211 - The Intruder, #2275 - The Wasp Woman, #2295 - The Pit and the Pendulum)
Review:
Apparently, when Roger Corman was making films for American International Pictures, there came a time to settle differences of his fee with a coin toss. He and Samuel Z. Arkoff would flip a coin...and Arkoff won a handful of times that made Corman interested to venture for himself. He went to Pathe Lab to try and finance a film, since they did their own print work and financed a few AIP movies. He got Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell to do the script but had to go with Ray Milland for the lead due to Vincent Price being in an exclusive AIP contract. And then...AIP arrived on the first day of production to say that they were now partners on this film, as they leveraged the position of not having any more lab work to become partners on what became this film. While the movie made some money with audiences, Corman reflected later that the response meant that the formula "had to be varied." The next "Poe Cycle" movie was Tales of Terror (1962), released four months later that was an anthology feature with Price and other noted names. The movie is inspired by the short story of the same name, as written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1844 that had an unnamed narrator with fears of being buried alive with "catalepsy" that tries to cope with the phobia...although that story ends with one ending their obsession with death.
It isn't a forgettable movie, but it definitely is one that shows strain. It may interest you to know that Milland was an Academy Award winning actor, having previously won it for The Lost Weekend (1945). The Welsh actor had a lengthy career, and he was more than happy to be a character actor in his later years with the occasional lead or two, as one might recognize him from AIP's 1963 classic (at least that's how I remember it) X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963); Milland acted until shortly before his death in 1986 at the age of 79. Unfortunately, The Premature Burial is not among his highlights, mainly because the movie does not give him to really do. It isn't merely a case of the movie needing the services of Price (four years younger than Milland, although each was already in their fifties by 1962), it just seems like a movie that is trying to coast on what you already saw from the last two Poe AIP movies and flailing. You want to see a worthy tragedy, you want to see something that could inspire anxiety and curiosity, but Milland can only do so much for a movie that doesn't really have a mystery or tragedy to it. You could almost pick a random actor from Milland's heyday to do this and possibly still have the same effect. It does not help that Court and Ney have absolutely nothing to contribute for what is meant to be a curiosity: a woman who wants to associate with a guy who believes he is doomed and a doctor in the middle of looking at his mental state. But they don't really stick in your mind for anything other than "okay". The sense of doom just seems like the previous two Poe movies but with diminishing returns besides the cemetary maybe being a different angle to look at this time. The dream sequence might be the most noted sequence in the whole film (which only runs at 81 minutes anyway) because it seems lurid and eerie in ways that actually makes one wonder where the rest of the energy went. The movie just isn't as fun as it really could be, managing to be a bit too cozy to really make anyone get chills for something that could've been a fun mystery or a look at a strange person. As it stands, it isn't a bad movie, but it just isn't accomplished enough to really recommend when there are better things elsewhere.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
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