Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie Review

The Fall of the House of Witley.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 31, 2013

Actors are a notoriously insecure lot, and many of them yearn for just one role that will help them make their mark on an oftentimes unpredictable industry. The irony is that for some actors who actually end up achieving that goal, they then spend the rest of their careers trying (often in vain) to escape the large, looming shadow that the iconic role created. Such was the case for the two early thirties stars who helped to establish Universal as the “monster studio”, Bela Lugosi, who made Dracula so unforgettable, and Boris Karloff, who of course entered the annals of film immortality as the monster in Frankenstein. Karloff actually seemed to weather the storms of show business a bit better than Lugosi, who of course devolved into substance abuse and, ultimately, a relatively early demise. Karloff was able to move into a rather wide variety of other roles, even if his bolt- necked marauder remained his single most renowned effort. Karloff had his own health issues, certainly nothing as devastating as those Lugosi encountered, but bad enough that by the time he appeared in Die, Monster, Die, he was consigned mostly to a wheelchair. Karloff’s physical immobility is only one of several issues confronting this frankly cheesy American-International outing, a film which attempts to revisit the glories of the Roger Corman-Edgar Allan Poe pieces, especially House of Usher . American-International had already begun branching out beyond the Poe oeuvre by supposedly utilizing the work of H.P. Lovecraft in such films as The Haunted Palace (though American-International hedged its bets by inserting a completely unrelated Poe poem which then allowed the studio to include Poe’s imprimatur as a selling point). Die, Monster, Die is based on Lovecraft’s chilling “The Colour Out of Space”, a story which combined Lovecraft’s typical demons with more of a science fiction underpinning, relating the effects of a mysterious meteorite which crashes to Earth and wreaks havoc both on the landscape as well as nearby inhabitants. The Witley family becomes the “recipient” of the meteorite’s disturbing powers, and that offers the gist of the horror in Die, Monster, Die.

An American named Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) arrives in the English village of Arkham via train and tells a cab to take him to Witley Manor. The cab driver instantly freaks out, removing Reinhart’s bag from his car and telling him he won’t accept the fare. As abrupt as the cab driver is, he’s nothing compared to the other townsfolk whom Reinhart encounters, all of whom resolutely refuse to even discuss the Witley manse, let alone where it’s located, with the visitor. In what is only the first (and perhaps the least problematic) lapse of logic that Die, Monster, Die indulges in, when it becomes clear Stephen is not going to be able to get any help finding out how to get to Witley Manor, he trudges off on foot to find it, despite not having a clue which way to go.

It probably won’t come as any big surprise to find out that Reinhart manages to find the Witley estate, though first he has to pass through a really strange, devastated landscape that looks like the remnants of some post-Apocalyptic explosion. Once Reinhart arrives at the gargantuan house, he calls out, with no one answering, and so of course he just walks right in. Almost instantly, he’s confronted by Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff), a wheelchair bound curmudgeon who does not take kindly to having his house invaded by a stranger. Within mere moments, Nahum’s lovely daughter Susan (Suzan Farmer) descends from the second floor, assuring her father that she had actually invited Stephen to visit.

There are strange doin’s at the Witley household, including a glowing green emanation from the bowels of the house, and the strangely isolated life of Susan’s mother and Nahum’s wife, Letitia (Freda Jackson). Letitia actually welcomes Stephen to the house (from the cloistered environment of her heavily veiled fourposter bed), which is much more than Nahum does, but at the same time, she attempts to warn him about a series of strange events. Throughout the film, Stephen is weirdly sanguine about the increasing horrors he witnesses, and this aspect begins almost immediately from his first interchange with Letitia, when he doesn’t seem at all bothered by the fact she stays sequestered behind the heavy drapery of her bed, even while she’s warning him of various evils around the Witley grounds.

Die, Monster, Die doles out its chills in a fairly reserved manner, letting the audience in on the fact that Letitia is pretty badly deformed, while at the same time revealing that Nahum is involved in some nefarious “mad scientist” experiments. But the film is really ham handed almost all of the time in how it structures scenes and delivers its scares. Over and over again, scenarist Jerry Sohl and director Daniel Haller (who served as Art Director on several of the Corman-Poe films) cut between two simultaneously unfolding scenes without ever staying with one or the other of them long enough to establish any sense of threat or menace. Repeatedly throughout this film, just when things start to build to what seems like might be a good, old fashioned shock, things cut away to another, less dramatic, element that has also been unfolding. It’s a curious gambit and one which tends to undercut any dramatic momentum.

Die, Monster, Die plays like a low rent cousin to House of Usher, with several plot points which are very similar to the earlier film and/or other Corman-Poe outings. First, we have an “outsider” arriving at a Rococo mansion with a pretty young love interest and an older, seemingly deranged, man. Portraits of various crazy looking ancestors dot the walls and add a palpable sense of terror to the environment. A half mad (or maybe more than half mad) woman traipses through the proceedings in a threatening manner. Finally, things wrap up with a huge conflagration, with the lovers escaping through a maelstrom of flame.

But unfortunately Die, Monster, Die has little of Usher’s sweep and dramatic impetus. The film also is unintentionally funny quite a bit of the time. Note, for example, how often the wheelchair bound Nahum manages to get up and down to various levels of the house without any visible means to do so. When Stephen and Susan stumble upon a menagerie that has been morphed by Nahum’s experiments, they initially don’t even pay attention to the bizarre beasts around them, and once they do, they’re almost completely nonplussed by what they see. And the finale, which sees Nahum supposedly rise from his infirmity in a highly mutated form is ridiculously obvious in its use of a stunt double (albeit one evidently wrapped in aluminum foil).

What Die, Monster, Die proves perhaps most strongly is just how integral the involvement of people like Roger Corman and Richard Matheson were to the success of the early Poe (and Lovecraft) adaptations. Die, Monster, Die is a reasonable facsimile, but like most copies, it doesn’t quite match the luster of the originals.

Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Die, Monster, Die is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. The film was shot in so-called "Colorscope", American-International's version of CinemaScope, and one of the most noticeable anomalies of this presentation is the overt anamorphic squeezing at the edges of the frame, something that tends to make things look slightly fish-eyed at times, especially when the camera pans across a static set. The opening few moments of the film are the most problematic from a damage standpoint, with fairly large specks and other dirt showing up. But take a deep breath and make it through the opening few minutes (which of course include a long optical for the credits, exacerbating the dirt issue), and things begin to look rather remarkably good. Color is accurate looking (if just a tad on the brown side), and is very lushly saturated. Fine detail is also quite commendable (look at things like the fine weave on the veil around the bed in screenshot 4 for a good example). The film is fairly soft looking at times, something that increases in the many fog shrouded scenes, and the increased resolution of the Blu-ray reveals the literal seams in some of the matte paintings, but generally speaking this is a great looking transfer, one free of overt digital manipulation, and one that should easily please the film's fans.

Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Die, Monster, Die features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that has just a slightly boxy sound at times, but which is otherwise free of any noticeable damage or problematic fidelity issues. Dialogue and the frequently bombastic Don Banks score both sound fine, if occasionally a bit shallow. Dynamic range is quite wide throughout the film.

Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080i; 1:55). It's perhaps notable that this trailer contains not one word of narration, as if even American-International didn't know quite what to say about it.

Die, Monster, Die! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Die, Monster, Die is probably best enjoyed as a minor curiosity, one of the less than stellar films Karloff filled his days with in the waning days of his long and legendary career. With a different screenwriter and director this probably could have been a more viscerally compelling experience. What's here is "okay", but rarely reaches the heights of the best American-International horror outings. That said, fans of the film should be very well pleased with the technical merits of this Blu-ray.