The Dungeon Of Harrow!

Pat Boyette is one of my all-time favorite comic book artists. He did a mountain of work for Charlton and others over the decades. He was a friendly and independent Texan, a good man by all accounts. I wish I'd been able to meet him. But he did more than comics. Boyette also wanted to make movies, and he did make one called The Dungeon of Harrow.

This is really a pretty terrible movie by any absolute standard. The sound and picture quality are suspect, but that is the poor quality of the print really. The color drops out periodically and sometime that helps. This might've been better in B&W actually.

The sets are meager, making Ed Wood's stuff seem polished in places. It all does have a claustrophobic feeling, but that' because the rooms are just tiny. I'm afraid the ubiquitous torches are going to incinerate the place any minute.

The story is pretty slim. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say the hero gets stranded on an island with some pretty insane characters and there's some torture, killing, and ghostly visitation before it's all said and done.

But aside from the visuals, which from time to time do deliver a compelling sense of drama, the thing that makes this movie flow like molasses is the horrible horrible acting. Boyette's voiceover is the best acting in the thing, making me wish he'd dubbed the main hero. This guy is wretched. He never seems to know what to do with his eyes, seems unclear of where to put his hands, and his delivery of dialogue is sometimes painful. His acting makes me yearn for the subtle nuances of Sven-Ole Thorson! The "Captain" who is standed with him is better but not by much. The others are better than these two leads, but it's likely because they have somewhat less to do. Now though, I think of the henchman "Mantis" and I take that back; he sucks too. I'll let other reviews give out more painful details, but suffice it to say, this is perhaps the worst acting I've seen in a professional movie. It's dreadful.

That said, there is an offbeat charm to this movie, a quaint dreamlike aspect that makes it better than the sum of its parts. But sadly when it comes to Pat Boyette, I'll take his comics work anytime over this example of his cinema work.

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