Every Monday, we’ll highlight a piece of writing from our vaults. This review of Die, Monster, Die! originally ran as ahome video review.
Daniel Haller’s 1965 film, Die, Monster, Die!, (also released as Monster of Terror) is a quintessential, if unimpressive, American International Pictures horror film. Although Roger Corman’s name does not appear anywhere on the film, Haller served as production designer and art director for many of Corman’s films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, and The Masque of the Red Death. It was on those films that Haller learned the filmmaking trade. Die, Monster, Die! was Haller’s first directorial foray. So it is no wonder that it closely mimics Corman’s Poe-inspired works.
Unfortunately, looking like one of Corman’s Poe-films is perhaps the best thing that I can say about Die, Monster, Die!. The story is not complex but it is unnecessarily convoluted. The writer, Jerry Sohl, adapted an H.P. Lovecraft short story, “The Colour Out of Space,” which could have been amazing but ends up disappointing (especially when one is familiar with the terrifically eerie source material). In the film, Jerry Sohl did not seem to know whether he wanted the source of the problem to be a Satanic curse, an alien mutagenic agent or radioactive material from outer-space. To Lovecraft, they were one and the same; to Sohl it was the audience’s choice. While certainly far from the best, this is not even the earliest film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. Credit for that goes to Roger Corman who adapted “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” for his film The Haunted Palace (credited to Edgar Allen Poe for the film’s release in a spectacularly convoluted bid for audience attention).
Boris Karloff is in this film. He mostly rolls around in a wheelchair and behaves in a menacing manner. It is not his best performance but neither is it his best role. Interestingly enough, after Die, Monster, Die!, Karloff appeared in Peter Bogdanovich’s first film (which Bogdanovich wrote, produced, and directed), Targets, in which Karloff is often praised for giving a terrific performance.
