Corman/Poe Month: 3. The Premature Burial (1962)

Last time, I said if you’re not looking to plow through all of Corman’s Poe cycle in order, you’re better off starting with The Pit and the Pendulum than that actual first film, House of Usher. Doubling down on that, if you’re not REALLY dedicated to watching each and every film in the series, The Premature Burial is the only one I’d honestly recommend skipping altogether.

You know when people say the story behind making a film would make a more interest movie than the actual movie that got made? That’s true of The Premature Burial on several levels. See, after the back to back success Usher and Pendulum, Roger Corman felt bold enough to make a Gothic Poe adaptation on his own, without the backing of American International Pictures. It was hardly the first time he’d gone into business for himself outside of AIP, but he normally only did that on projects even cheaper and dinkier than the ones he was already making. The Premature Burial would be Corman’s first “big” solo production. This decision would have several negative consequences on the finished film, but it all turned out to be for nothing anyway. On the first day of filming, AIP head honchos James H. Nicholson and Sam Arkoff strolled up and announced The Premature Burial had been taken over by American International after all. See, Corman’s main financial backer had been film developers Pathé Lab, who also happened to make most of the prints for AIP as well. Arkoff and Nicholson threatened to take AIP’s business elsewhere if Pathé tried to enter into the distribution business (and, to be fair, would YOU want your film prints being handled by your competition?) and suddenly The Premature Burial was back at American International. Well, that’s Hollywood for ya.

So let’s just rip this Band-Aid off right away and get the pain over with. There’s plenty of things wrong with The Premature Burial, but the thing I struggle most to get over is actually something that’s NOT in the movie: Vincent Price. Yup, one of the consequences of trying to move the production away from AIP was Corman either being unable to afford Price or unable to work around contractual issues. Either way, when the film went into production, the staring role went to one Ray Millard instead, and… Look, I hesitate to say Millard is BAD; he had a fairly distinguished career both before and after this film. I also don’t want to dump on a movie solely because I would have rather it did something else. This movie doesn’t have any giant robots in it, either, but I’m not gonna dock it points for failing to be something it never set out to be. AND YET, this movie sticks so close to the pattern of the previous two Poe films that it’s impossible not to compare its failures to their successes, and a substantial number of those failures involve Ray Millard struggling to pull off a performance I know for a fact Vincent Price could and did pull off elsewhere. And since he’s back in all of Corman’s other Poe movies, I’m gonna go ahead and take this chance to talk more about Price in this review of a movie he’s not in.

I’ve heard multiple people say that the difference between Vincent Price overacting and INSERT INFAMOUS HAM HERE overacting is that Price actually did it by choice. A lot of noted scenery chewers HAVE to go big to be remembered, because they just aren’t good enough to give a subtle, naturalistic performance that anyone would buy. Price could and did tone it down, when he wanted to, but specifically cranked up the theatrical bombast when he felt the material would benefit from it. And you know what? Very often it did, especially the Poe adaptations. So much of the problem in trying to adapt Poe for the screen is the degree to which the “action” takes place in the main character’s head. Since simply narrating out page after page of internal monologue simply doesn’t work in film, having a performer who can communicate in one expression what Poe took a whole page to spell out is an invaluable asset. Even when the adaptation has as little to do with the source material as Corman’s usually did, the oppressive mood still demands the kind of performer with enough energy to keep his head above the water, as it were. Price’s larger than life performances worked wonders in keeping the Gothic gloom from weighing the whole picture down… and Ray Milland absolutely fails in that role.

Again, it's incredibly obvious how Milland is expected to play the stereotypical Price role here: haunted and tortured, possibly unhinged, yet still sympathetic and tragic. Instead, Milland brings all the energy of a constantly annoyed high school teacher. He shouldn’t be playing a man struggling with the fear that it’s all in his head and the infinitely worse fear that it’s NOT all in his head, he should be the stuffy, unsympathetic side character telling the lead to just get over it already. For most of the film, Milland vacillates between looking like a petulant brat and an abrasive jerk, and given that the entire film hinges on his character holding my interest, and preferably my sympathy, that’s not a good thing.

But honestly, even if Corman HAD managed to land Price for The Premature Burial, the best that could have achieved would be a fun performance in a crap movie, because there’s WAY more wrong here than just the lead. For one thing, the plot has virtually nothing to do with the Poe story beyond the idea of a character being morbidly afraid of being buried alive. And sure, Pendulum mostly made up a plot of its own too, but Burial just feels tired. I mean, it’s right there in the title! This is Corman’s third Poe movie and it’s also the third to revolve around vivisepulture. Yes, I had to look up that fancy word for “buried alive,” because guess what? There’s only so many ways you can talk about a thing before it starts to feel repetitive! Charles Beaumont and Rey Russell may be writing the screenplay instead of Richard Matheson, but the end result still feels like a retread of all the ground the previous two covered. What’s more, the structure of the film as a whole just feels… off to me. Look, let me sum up the basic premise for you:

“Guy Carrell is a well-to-do med student in the Victorian era, studying under his fiancée’s father. The thing about this being the Victorian era, though, is that the universities have to get… creative in acquiring cadavers to train on. Thus, Guy helps the professor with a body snatching side hustle, but he’s really not cut out for it. More than most people, I mean. See, when Guy was a kid, he was convinced that his father’s “death” was actually catalepsy, and swore he could hear Dad struggling in the crypt afterwards. No one’s every believed Guy about this, but he’s been obsessed with the fear of being buried alive ever since, especially since he also fears the catalepsy is hereditary. So when the grave robbing crew goes out one night and finds a casket where the body genuinely seems to have been trying to claw it’s way out, Guy takes it hard. Really hard. He drops out of med school, breaks off his engagement, and resigns himself to moping around his room being a gloomy emo freak. Guy’s fiancé Emily and fellow student Miles try to help him out of this funk, but more and more things keep going SUSPICIOUSLY wrong in ways that make Guy’s mental state even worse. It’s almost like somebody wants to scare the poor dope to death…”

When I put all the information this film gives me into my brain, that’s the order in which it comes back out again. That’s the way I’d just naturally expect this information to be arranged. But that’s NOT the way the film is structured at all. The discovery of the prematurely buried dude is the pre-credits opener, happening before I even know who guy is. Then, after the credits, the film jumps into Emily showing up to find out why Guy is dumping her, having had his whole initial breakdown off-screen. After that, he film piles on TONS of backstory to try and retroactively add meaning to events that already happened and descriptions of events that aren’t shown and it just gets so BORING. That one complaint I have about The Pit and the Pendulum being too flashback-heavy is a MUCH bigger problem here, and it fuels most of the other complaints that follow. I get so bored watching people sit around talking in circles and mopeing that my mind wanders, and that’s when I start thinking about how familiar the plot elements are and much I miss Vincent Price. Or about how the mansion set for this movie doesn’t have anywhere the moody atmosphere of the previous films, just coming across as drab and stuffy. Or how the “exterior” scenes are about as convincingly outdoors as the graveyard in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Or what a mistake is was to try and repurpose the old folk tune “Molly Malone” as the suspense motif. Or how the gaslighting plot against Guy relies on so many events that are totally beyond the plotter’s control, like Guy’s dog apparently getting STRUCK BY FRICKIN’ LIGHTNING. In other words, there’s an awful lot of things wrong with The Premature Burial.

…and yet, it’s not COMPLETELY worthless, there’s still a few moments where the film threatens to come to life, at least for a bit. For one thing, there’s an extended sequence where Guy has become obsessed with constructing the most escapable mausoleum ever, to the point that it becomes his man cave (where he paints some EXTREMELY metal pictures of Hell, courtesy of artist Burt Shonberg). Guy showing off his increasingly ludicrous failsafe mechanisms to Emily and Miles is one of the few where Ray Milland finds something to latch onto and make his performance genuinely interesting. He’s like an extremely creepy kid showing off a particularly ghoulish new toy, and that fleeting sense of fun is infectious. And what’s more, there’s the film’s climax. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that a Gothic Horror movie called The Premature Burial ultimately has its main character get buried prematurely. Unlike the story, though, this is for real and not a fake-out, and instead of getting over his fear, Guy emerges from the ordeal murderously insane. And I don’t say that figuratively, either. With only a few minutes of runtime to go, The Premature Burial suddenly turns into a sort of Victorian proto-Slasher, and it’s the only other time where the movie threatens to become kind of good. Again, I find Milland’s performance a lot more interesting when he’s got something to actually DO, instead of just trying to sound tortured and sad. He seems to be having a lot more fun in the crazed lunatic murderer role, to the point that I kind of wish the movie was actually about THAT. Seriously, if the film were completely restructured to be about Guy as a psycho killer offing everybody he thinks might have wronged him, maybe with some detective hearing the “actual” story from the other characters during his investigation, I might like that a lot better. Sort of like if Citizen Kane were about Jack the Ripper. Granted, this theoretical movie would have even LESS to do with the Poe story, and relying even harder on flashbacks would be a VERY risky move… but it’d still give the films leading man a chance to actually be interesting for more than ten minutes out of the whole film, and I think that’s kind of important.

So yeah, my concluding thoughts on The Premature Burial are me making up an entirely different movie. That tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Thankfully, Roger Corman wouldn’t try to break away from AIP again until well after the Poe cycle was finished, and thus would have no reason NOT to have Vincent Price front and center on all the remaining features. And, apparently, Corman decided that the next movie would try to make up on lost time…