"Terrified!" actually has a pretty effective opening setup, with a masked killer burying a young male victim alive in wet cement.(That's a pretty awful way to go). The scene is well done, builds to a climax, and packs quite a punch.
Alas, it's pretty much downhill from there.
I give the director and the photographer credit for making the most out of their sets and their budget - the "Ghost Town" is well used, and the stark black and white cinematography helps the movie look a lot better than it actually is.
What kills the movie:
1) anyone who has ever watched a mystery movie will be able to figure out who the masked killer is in the first 15 minutes. It's simply a matter of "economy of characters". So the final "revelation" of his identity doesn't pack all that much of a punch.
2) The central idea for the screenplay reads like something written by someone who has no idea what so-called "college students" actually do in their classes. Or in their spare time. Especially psychology students. I graduated with a B.S. in Psychology from an accredited state university, and I never once tried to write a paper on "terror and the human mind" as an undergraduate. Let alone a mid-term. Let me correct any mistaken impressions left by this movie: Psychology majors spend all their time fractionating rat's brains,taking statistics courses, reading books about the DSM IV, and trying to devise "double blind" experiments on students in the Psych 101 classes. They do NOT play "cat and mouse" with masked killers in abandoned "Ghost Towns".
3) The central "motor" of the movie, the running struggle between Ken and the masked figure, isn't staged with any conviction or decent fight choreography. It lacks any real sense of urgency or conviction, at least to someone who has sat through many similar movies. The director needed to either review what he learned from Hitchcock movies or else he needed better stunt people.
4) The cast isn't actually bad, especially for this kind of movie. But huge chunks of the dialog were about past events we never see (you need to "show" people key events, not just "tell" them) and I kept getting yanked out of the movie by what I tend to call the "No Human Beings Ever Talked Like This" factor. The actors just can't salvage the dialog and make the most contrived lines work.
Still, I've seen much worse. In fact I've seen much worse in the same "Gorehouse Greats" 12 movie collection this movie came in. In its favor "Terrified!" is easily the first or second best movie of the 6 I've seen in the collection. (It was 12 movies for 5 dollars. I wasn't expecting Coppola).
Alas, it's pretty much downhill from there.
I give the director and the photographer credit for making the most out of their sets and their budget - the "Ghost Town" is well used, and the stark black and white cinematography helps the movie look a lot better than it actually is.
What kills the movie:
1) anyone who has ever watched a mystery movie will be able to figure out who the masked killer is in the first 15 minutes. It's simply a matter of "economy of characters". So the final "revelation" of his identity doesn't pack all that much of a punch.
2) The central idea for the screenplay reads like something written by someone who has no idea what so-called "college students" actually do in their classes. Or in their spare time. Especially psychology students. I graduated with a B.S. in Psychology from an accredited state university, and I never once tried to write a paper on "terror and the human mind" as an undergraduate. Let alone a mid-term. Let me correct any mistaken impressions left by this movie: Psychology majors spend all their time fractionating rat's brains,taking statistics courses, reading books about the DSM IV, and trying to devise "double blind" experiments on students in the Psych 101 classes. They do NOT play "cat and mouse" with masked killers in abandoned "Ghost Towns".
3) The central "motor" of the movie, the running struggle between Ken and the masked figure, isn't staged with any conviction or decent fight choreography. It lacks any real sense of urgency or conviction, at least to someone who has sat through many similar movies. The director needed to either review what he learned from Hitchcock movies or else he needed better stunt people.
4) The cast isn't actually bad, especially for this kind of movie. But huge chunks of the dialog were about past events we never see (you need to "show" people key events, not just "tell" them) and I kept getting yanked out of the movie by what I tend to call the "No Human Beings Ever Talked Like This" factor. The actors just can't salvage the dialog and make the most contrived lines work.
Still, I've seen much worse. In fact I've seen much worse in the same "Gorehouse Greats" 12 movie collection this movie came in. In its favor "Terrified!" is easily the first or second best movie of the 6 I've seen in the collection. (It was 12 movies for 5 dollars. I wasn't expecting Coppola).