All Rise...

Appellate Judge Daryl Loomis is above ground, but consistently premature.

Editor's Note

Our review of The Roger Corman Collection, published October 29th, 2007, is also available.

The Charge

Within the coffin I lie…ALIVE!

The Case

For all the cult movies and oddities that I've reviewed for this site over the years, I believe this is my first time writing about Roger Corman, the all-time king of cult fare. Between his directorial projects and the staggering number of films he has produced over the decades, you seemingly can't throw a cat without hitting a Corman movie, yet I've never written about one. That now changes as we look at The Premature Burial, his third of what would turn out to be eight films based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. This is high-class Corman, or at least as classy as his movies get, and it comes to Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

The young Emily Gault (Hazel Court, The Curse of Frankenstein) arrives to visit her betrothed, the former medical student Guy Carrell (Ray Miland, The Lost Weekend). He doesn't want to see her, though, because his lifelong fear of being buried alive has rendered him totally useless. She insists, so he relents and despite his crippling fear, they begin their life together. Emily tries desperately to get him to come to terms with the ridiculousness of it all, but when he is shocked into paralysis by a terrible sight, his fears come true and wakes to find himself underground and in a coffin.

For every other Corman/Poe movie, audiences were charmed by the presence of star Vincent Price. That wasn't an option for The Premature Burial, so Corman went with Ray Milland, who is a far cry from Price in both screen presence and acting chops. But Milland had starred in other Corman films, so was a known quantity, and is just barely acceptable in the role. Either way, the actor is so far too old for the part that it' almost laughable. But these are the kinds of things that didn't matter to Roger Corman and it's on with the show.

This is one of the least of his Poe pictures, maybe only behind of The Masque of the Red Death in pointlessness. The first hour of the movie is terribly boring and the movie's only 81 minutes long. When it finally gets going, it's pretty fun, but it feels like forever before it gets there. There are plenty of fun moments in those last 20 minutes, especially with Milland running around offing people, but I don't know that it's quite enough to wholly recommend it.

Still, like Corman's other Poe movies, production values are relatively high for him or, better put, he hides the cheapness much better in these movies than he usually does. He?s trying to emulate the budgetary efficiency of England's Hammer Films and does so pretty effectively. The trouble is that, without the benefit of centuries old locations, it forces a ton of extremely tight close ups to mask the fact that they're on some cheap set. That's okay, but I think my relative negativity toward The Premature Burial comes down to the fact that, while I have all the respect in the world for Roger Corman, I don't really like his movies all that much. That's a sad admission for somebody who love cult movies as much as I do, but things like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes just don't hold appeal to me. The Poe pictures hold a little more for me, as I've loved Poe's work since I was young, but without Vincent Price, the work is little more than tolerable to me.

For true fans of the movie, though, The Premature Burial has been granted a pretty solid Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. The 2.35:1/1080p image looks generally quite nice, with nicely natural and bright colors, solid black levels, and decent detail. That detail is somewhat marred by the nature of the film and its foggy cover up, but it's as good as one can hope for this cheap a movie. Grain is a little noisy, but not bad, and there are no compression errors or digital artifacts to speak of. Sound is solid, if very basic. The two-channel mono audio is nice and clean, with almost no noise or his. Dialog is always clear and the music is strong without being overpowering.

Extras, however, are a pretty scant lot. A ten-minute interview with Corman is very informative about the production of the movie. The guy is always an engaging interview and this one is no different. They continue with another ten minutes with director Joe Dante (Gremlins), who discusses watching the movie as a youngster and its place in the realm of Corman's Poe cycle. A brief featurette called "Trailers from Hell" revisits Corman and much of the same information from before. The original trailer rounds out the disc.

The Premature Burial comes with promise, but it doesn't quite deliver. Too dull in the first two acts to make up for an acceptable third, but the disc is good and fans of the film will appreciate how the movie looks half a century after its release.

The Verdict

Not great, but not guilty.

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