Terror
(Rhino Region 0 NTSC DVD)
(1978)
review by Catwalk

Terror contains five opening minutes of the most annoying filmmaking ever, particularly due to the endless screaming of a woman attempting escape from the religious men chasing her. From there, though, it quickly picks up with a hanging and beheading in the next two minutes.

After making a movie with a similar premise, descendants of the Mad Dolly feel her curse, and the curse of bad 70’s parties. The movie jumps directly into its morale; amateur hypnotists shouldn’t have swords around, and wind machines make everything evil (as opposed to fog machines, which make hair metal bands obnoxious).

The cast then must figure out if they are in fact suffering from said evil curse, as believed immediately by interchangeable dark haired guy number one. No one, of course, thinks he could possibly be credible, so instead, they venture out into the dangerous realm of the wind machines and are promptly killed in various ways.

Before you know it, there’s a masculine German broad with a whip, a giant bald guy with sunglasses and more fun than you can shake a London bobby’s nightstick at. For a movie with mostly cut-scene deaths, there is a ton of blood. That’s not to say it’s on the young Peter Jackson scale, not much is, but there’s a lot of food coloring in this one. The special effects are pretty well done, including some creative death scenes.

Don’t wait around for a great deal of explanation or character development in this massacre, enjoy it for the various ways people can be dismembered and impaled, and try to leave with a mental image other than the German dame with the whip.

Terror is included in an eight-pack of movies titled Horrible Horrors by Rhino Home Entertainment. Extras include only scene selection and a laughable score over the title menus which earns it ½ skull.