I like the story of the making of this - Fred Olen Ray saw some sets left over from the 1989 Masque of the Red Death and used them to shoot a few days of a movie, then went and shot the rest in a couple of days. It is impressive you can knock out a film in a few days but it will impact on quality and that's the case here.
Corman quickies like Little Shop of Horrors and The Terror stand the test of time because you've got elements like Charles Griffith's script, Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and so on. They also are set pretty much in the one place. This is a "quest" movie so doesn't adapt as well to quickie locations.
I also don't think Ray is a very good filmmaker. I love the idea of him, love his books, and it's always fascinating to see how he gets production value - for instance Russ Tamblyn, Lawrence Tierney and Lyle Waggoner, the "names", are all based in one or two locations but referred to throughout the film so their parts seem bigger.
The actual leads are Heidi Paine and Blake Bahner - he rescues her from an attack and they go to rescue her dad, who is Tamblyn. These performances are weak but in the actors defence they don't have characters to play -Ray doesn't even do something simple like make the girl hoity toity and the guy swashbuckling, to get some character conflict.
Scenes are awkwardly staged, shot and acted - I kept thinking throughout "that bit's amateurish... and that bit".
It's fun to see Tamblyn and Tierney, some of the sets are okay and one or two bits I didn't mind... but it felt like a bunch of amateurs on the weekend throwing something together, like in a country town or something.
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