The only movie Roger Corman made that he didn’t understand: “Makes no sense whatsoever”

Even great filmmakers make terrible films, but it’s usually for noble reasons. They might have run out of money and been forced to limp to the finish line or do a rush job at the end that turns an otherwise excellent movie into an incomprehensible mess. Terry Gilliam and Francis Ford Coppola are well-known victims (or repeat offenders, depending on your perspective) of this pitfall.

Then there are the head-scratchers. How, for example, did Brian De Palma’s starry adaptation of the bestselling novel Bonfire of the Vanities turn out to be such a catastrophic misfire? Everyone might have started out with the best intentions, but somewhere along the line, all that ambition turned to utter garbage.

Sometimes, however, even the filmmaker knows the project is a fool’s errand from the beginning. Such was the case with Roger Corman, the visionary behind the New American Cinema movement of the 1970s and mentor to such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, and John Carpenter. Although he famously referred to himself as the “Orson Welles of the Z movie,” he was a cinephile whose movies, however campy and lurid, were full of panache. He was also, as his self-deprecating description of himself suggests, extremely self-aware and unafraid to call out his cinematic stumbles.

Speaking with Empire Magazine in 2020, the filmmaker behind such gems as Attack of the Crab Monsters, Bloody Mama, and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre said that there was only one movie he ever made that he didn’t quite understand, a 1963 Jack Nicholson vehicle called The Terror, which its star said is “the only film that I know of that has no storyline that you can follow”.

“The picture actually makes no sense whatsoever,” Corman agreed. “It was only shot because it rained on a Sunday while I was making The Raven, and I got the idea that I could take advantage of this rather impressive set we had. We wrote it in a week. My ace assistant, Francis Coppola, shot a couple of days, then we shut down until we got some more money, then Jack Hill shot a few days, Monte Hellman shot a few days, and on the last day of shooting, Jack Nicholson came to me and said, ‘Roger, every idiot in town has directed part of this film. Let me direct the last day.’ I said, ‘Why not, Jack? You can direct.’”

The Terror is, indeed, a bit of a trainwreck. It’s a period horror film in which Nicholson plays a soldier in Napoleon’s army who falls in love with a shape-shifting devil, played by Sandra Knight. The great Boris Karloff plays an evil, murderous baron who wears colourful silk suits and lives in a chilly castle made mostly of cardboard.

It’s worth watching simply to see Jack Nicholson looking confused and a little lost with the whole thing. He is endearingly and probably inadvertently vulnerable in this film in a way that he has definitely never been before or since. That said, the plot is utterly nonsensical, and even at an hour and 19 minutes, it feels interminable.

Related Topics

This post was originally published on here