FORMAT: VHS
Loosely based on The Premature Burial, Haunting Fear is writer/director Fred Olen Ray’s love letter to Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies.
Brinke Stevens stars as a woman who can’t sleep because she keeps having waking nightmares about being buried alive. Jay Richardson is her philandering husband who owes a bunch of money and wants to bump her off. He schemes with his lover (Delia Sheppard) to drive her insane to cash in on her inheritance, but things go sour. Fast.
Picked up by Troma (of all people) and distributed on home video by Rhino, Haunting Fear has to go down as one of Ray’s best. In fact, I’m not sure why it took me this long to check it out. In addition to Corman and Poe, Rays seems to take inspiration from A Nightmare on Elm Street for the dream sequences. (Fortunately, only one of the dream-within-a-dream scenes threatens to test the audience’s patience.) There’s plenty of gruesome stuff here too, like a cool oozing skull, a Fulci-influenced knife through the head and out the mouth, and a decapitated head. The score by Chuck (Not of This Earth) Cirino is excellent too.
Brinke is terrific in this (this is supposedly her favorite performance, and it’s easy to see why), especially when she’s flipped her lid. She also has some fine bathtub and nude scenes. Sheppard has some hot sex scenes too. (“Nobody fucks you like I do!”) Fans of Ray’s work will no doubt enjoy seeing his regular cast of supporting players like Richardson (who’s great as always), Robert Quarry (as a loan shark), Michael Berryman (as a creepy morgue attendant), and Hoke Howell (Brinke’s dead father) popping up. Karen Black is second-billed as a hypnotist but doesn’t show up until the movie is halfway over. Jan-Michael Vincent is top-billed, but he spends most of the movie in his car and looks pretty out of it a lot of the time.
Much of the same cast appeared in Ray’s Teenage Exorcist.
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