The Premature Burial

Ray Milland replaced Vincent Price in Corman’s third film based on a Poe story because the film was originally made outside of the traditional connection with American International Pictures, to which Price was contractually bound. Nevertheless, we otherwise have all of the usual ingredients and formulas here, such as a stranger who is a persona non grata in a gloomy mansion, paintings of disturbing, expressive images and a morbid fascination with death. This time, the motif of being buried alive is expanded to the central theme and around it is built the usual story of ugly family relations, the curse of the past and terribly grotesque punishment from the grave. In comparison with other Poe-based pictures, the film gets its distinctiveness from studio exteriors of swamps with a tonne of manmade fog and, primarily, through a superb etude on the theme of a recipe book of excellent morbid ideas. The passage in which the hero boasts of his private tomb with a hundred and one possibilities of escape in the event of being buried alive offers one of the most bizarre images of unhinged DIY and cottage keeping. (2016.06.26)

Looking back, all Corman films merge into one indistinguishable bunch. The main difference in The Premature Burial is that Vincent Price is replaced by Ray Milland, which is not something you can value positively, but at least it’s a change… The beginning of the film is stretched to almost two thirds of it, which, given the late hour of the screening, had a negative effect on my cognitive abilities, in particular, attention and focus :) 65 % (2011.06.07)