Die! Monster! Die!

“Father has never allowed me to go on the heath.”

I love old horror movies from the 1960’s based on H.P. Lovecraft. They are always so cheesy. Die! Monster! Die! Is based on “The Colour Out of Space,” and has all the things you would expect from a British horror movie of the time. There’s a spooky old mansion that no one from the town wants to go (I almost had visions of The Haunting, with “no one will come at night, in the dark, “ etc.) and that houses a family with a somewhat sinister back story. There are oversized, forced perspective shots of “alien” things, plus glowing “radiation” rocks, and there’s the plucky heroine and her creepy parents – but this time you get a bonus. It’s Boris Karloff.

Die! Monster! Die! was a lot of fun. It’s silly, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. A young American man, Stephen, travels to his fiancée’s English estate. There’s trouble there – her father has found a meteorite that ends up mutating the animals and plants on the estate. When the meteorite begins changing the family members, Stephen must get Leticia away to safety, and her father must fight his demons. Who will survive?

Like I said before, Die! Monster! Die! was so much fun. Boris Karloff really hams it up – glowering from his wheelchair, eyebrows wiggling. Really, he makes the movie, along with the overly gigantic animals and plants. If you like those Hammer films and the like, you’d probably like this one.

Rating: 4 Purrs for a fun, silly Lovecraft movie complemented by Boris Karloff brows