Terrified (1963)

Director: Lew Landers

Writer: Richard Bernstein

Composer: Michael Anderson

Starring: Rod Lauren, Steve Drexel, Tracy Olsen, Stephen Roberts, Sherwood Keith, barbara Luddy, Denver Pyle, Lee Bradley, Ben Frank, Danny Welton, Nona Carver, Michael Fellen, Robert Towers

More info: IMDb

Tagline: A BLACK GRAVEYARD...WITH A KILLER ON THE LOOSE!

Plot: A college psychology student, intent on writing a term paper on how much terror the human mind can endure, learns his answers first-hand as he finds himself the target of a mysterious, hooded killer in an Old West ghost town.

My rating: 4/10

Will I watch it again? No.

I'm burning through a 4-DVD/8-film set from BCI over the course of two days (6 the day of this writing and two tomorrow).  It's all low budget, public domain stuff but it's sci-fi and horror from the 50s and 60s.  It's mostly crap but it's 50+ year old crap which kind of makes it a little more tolerable.  This one doesn't have much going for it as far as working up a desire to watch.  Future DUKES OF HAZZARD's Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) plays the sheriff but you won't easily recognize him.  I didn't until he started raising his voice and his teeth were showing from the side.  Weird, I know.  Seeing the guy buried alive was neat and so was the Western ghost town.  There's a really nice shot near the end when a car pulls up and you see the town from inside the car's point of view and it's only lit with the auto's headlights.  The story is actually pretty neat but it's the execution that helps hurt it.  There's too much to do, scenes last too long, the music is often repetitive, and so on...the usual things that hurt low budget pictures.  But this was directed by Lew Landers (his last picture, by the way) who made over a hundred films and dozens and dozens of TV episodes.  Maybe he was tired.  Beats me but it's unnecessarily slow.  Good story or not, it drags enough to keep reaching for the remote to see how much time is left and that ain't good.