Review: Macabre

Local GP William Prince comes home to find his young daughter has been kidnapped. His secretary Jacqueline Scott (in her film debut) receives a disturbing phone call claiming that the child has been buried alive with only a few hours left. The race to locate her burial site begins...well, after a lot of standing around and talking. Jim Backus plays the local sheriff who has a grudge against Prince from way back, concerning the deaths of both men’s wives (who were sisters to one another).

 

Schlock producer-director William Castle (“House on Haunted Hill”, “I Saw What You Did”) has an off day with this slow and unhelpfully complicated 1958 thriller. The cast looks good on paper but no one has a very good showing here. William Prince (a good actor elsewhere) is implausibly calm and too flat, whilst a fence-swinging Jacqeline Scott is at the other extreme from moment one. Scripted by Robb White (Castle’s “House on Haunted Hill”) from an Anthony Boucher novel, the premise is a workable one but why in the hell does this film spend so much time on characters talking when there’s a poor child in danger? It has a fatal lack of urgency, and the occasional showing of a ticking clock hardly compensates. I’m afraid Mr. Castle, for all that he is good at – promotion for instance – is not adept at making race-against-the-clock thrillers. 72 minutes feels like 100 with this film.

 

The B&W cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie (“Caged”, “House on Haunted Hill”) is nice and certain story elements are quite shocking for 1958, otherwise this is even worse than Castle’s boring remake of “The Old Dark House” and seems like a filmmaker who hadn’t quite gotten himself together yet. By the way, the gimmick this time was an insurance policy against ‘Death by Fright’, I doubt there would’ve been any fatal cases with this bore (though the gimmick did help at the box-office, to be fair). 

 

Rating: C-

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