Ring of Terror

Rating:
Summary: I fell in to a lousy Ring of Terror
Review: It's always a bad sign when some pseudo-spooky old character is called upon to introduce a given horror film to the audience - it's not as if viewers need to prepare themselves for the all-consuming thrills that Ring of Terror waits to unleash upon them. You will spot a ring here, but terror is definitely a no-show. Ring of Terror is the story of Lewis Moffett, the world's oldest 22-year-old medical student, a man who stands out among his equally ancient fellow students for his oddly prominent fearless nature. He's not afraid of anything, supposedly, and even his girlfriend worries that his fearlessness will lead him to a bad end. We meet the gang of forty-ish kids as they anxiously await their first autopsy viewing and get ready for their fraternity initiations. Moffett gets through the autopsy like an old pro, even volunteering to wheel the dead body into the classroom. Naturally, the frat elders decide to test young Moffett's bravery in the form of his initiation assignment - and they just so happen to hit on the one thing that terrifies him. That's about it. A comic book could have taken care of this story in about two pages, but director Clark L. Paylow manages to milk this insignificant, easily predictable plot into seventy-one minutes of wasted celluloid. Part of the useless padding consists of a degrading look at an overweight couple eating everything in sight and then going out of their way to make everyone laugh at them.

You wouldn't know this film was made in 1962 by looking at it - it looks more like the low-quality serials made in the early days of cinema with its dark print and horrible sound quality. It stars no one you've ever heard of, fails to work up even the notion of actual fright, and ends rather cheesily. This could have been a decent story (it was supposedly based on a true story, but I'll need to see some documentation before I buy into that claim) - if only it had been made as a short feature included in a group of comics-style horror tales. As a standalone product, Ring of Terror just doesn't deliver the goods.