Fear Chamber – review

Directors: Jack Hill & Juan Ibáñez

Release date: 1968

Contains spoilers

I received a message from Leila asking whether I had ever considered this film as a vampire film – which I hadn’t. However I was immediately excited to realise that it might mean a further vampire film starring the late, great Boris Karloff (Isle of the Dead, Black Sabbath, House of Frankenstein, Mad Monster Party? & host of Thriller). Unfortunately it is not a great Swan Song, one of four Mexican movies that he was contracted for and clearly rather frail when he made it – his character spends a great deal of time bedridden or sat down – the film is rather silly… but we can handle a bit of silly.

into the cave

It starts with a dungeon scene, including skeletons, whipping and screams. Its all filmed in an off-kilter way, as though it’s a bad trip… We shift scene and, though they are hidden within fire proximity suits, we see Corinne (Julissa) and Mark (Carlos East) make their way into caves within a volcano. They are looking for something, a primal form of life that Corinne’s father Dr. Karl Mantell (Boris Karloff) has theorised may live near the earth’s core. He is at home, in contact by telephone whilst his assistant/nurse Helga (Isela Vega, La Señora Muerte) fusses. They find what they were looking for.

a new victim

We cut to the “Beneficent Foundation: Foreign Employment for Young Woman”, as a handy sign tells us. A young woman is preparing for bed inside (though she is unnerved by the artwork and unaware of the man watching from the ventilation grating). After she has fallen asleep a sinister dwarf (Santanón, Santo and Blue Demon Vs the Monsters) creeps in and then the whole wall and her bed turns and she is suddenly in the dungeon. She is terrorised and herded through the dungeon until she is in a cage and forced to watch a satanic sacrifice of another woman.

the priest looks familiar

But wait, keen-eyed viewer… surely the satanic priest is non-other than Dr. Karl Mantell. He calls for her and she is dragged out of the cell and placed over hot coals to be sacrificed and, passes out. A gurney is pulled in and Mantell has shrugged off satanic priest robes and is in surgical scrubs. They take her through to an operating theatre where they take her blood. They brought the living rock back (if it is living; Mantell describes it as not living, also as anti-life later, but eventually concedes that it is living) and are now trying to keep it functioning whilst they use computers to decode its signals (again, a mark of how loosely conceived the film is can be found in the dialogue where sometimes they suggest it gives out signals but has no intelligence and at the same time argue over whether it can lie). Unfortunately, it requires a hormone only found in human blood when the person has gone through extreme terror, hence putting victims through the titular Fear Chamber (generously I’ll suggest that this food source is necessary because it has been removed from its home environment and the hormone replicates the normal food-stuff, as there are not going to be humans around in its natural environment).

the rock creature

So, they manage to take enough blood to feed the rock but not so much that the victim will die (Mantell draws a line here, it seems, though unbeknownst to him, some of his performers/researchers have looser morals and managed to kill at least one victim previously) though this latest victim does have a medical complication. The next day she is convinced it was a dream and sent to her new job that the foundation found her. However Helga has the bowl knocked from her hand by a tendril the rock has developed (which she describes as a feeding tube). Burley assistant Roland (Yerye Beirute, El ataúd del Vampiro) claims communication (telepathic, that the others ignore and dismiss) and says it is still hungry – as do the computer print outs.

grabbed by a stony tentacle

A new woman in the institute, the next day, sneaks out of her room as she is actually a thief (though what she's after is never made clear) and finds the secret door to the lab. Inside she is attacked by the rock creature, which grabs her by the feeding tube and sucks the terror spiked blood from her – an act that leaves her corpse aged. This incident causes Mantell to destroy it and end up bedridden. Corinne and Mark leave for a vacation and so Helga decides to revive the creature and continue the experiments – she later suggests that it seduced her and Roland.

feeding ages the victims

What we have then is a living rock that feeds on human blood, though this is a means to get to the fear hormone it needs. The act of feeding drains the youth from the victim for no adequately explored reason. It is intelligent, deceitful and, they learn to their shock, able to interface with the computers. The dialogue is the worst kind of technobabble at times and whilst there is a moment of topless nudity (when Helga brings a stripper back for the rock creature and she performs) this seemed to have ambitions of a sleazy level of sexploitation that it didn’t achieve. I think it is a little unfair to suggest Karloff phones his performance in, after all he was clearly in poor health, but it is not a great performance from an actor capable of so much more. The film itself deserves probably no more than 3.5 out of 10 – bolstered by the fact that it achieves some sort of drive-in-zen and yet… rock vampire.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK