Die, Monster, Die!
Daniel Haller
Initial release: October 27, 1967 (USA)
Also known as: Monster of Terror (UK)
Universal Studios and Hammer Films to this day remain the reigning kings of classic horror cinema. From the 1920s through 1960s, these two studios did much to define what horror movies looked like, at least up to around 1970 as filmmakers began moving away from studios and sound stages. But there was one other studio that was just as important, though they're not as well known nowadays, and that was American International Pictures. Originally founded in the mid-fifties as a strictly B-movie outfit, they hit pay dirt with Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe cycle, beginning with a hit adaptation of House of Usher in 1960. The success of House of Usher led to AIP building a sort of expanded universe, with Corman producing several films based on Poe (or H.P. Lovecraft in one case... or an original story in another.)
Actually, let's go back to that Lovecraft story. By the early 1960s, the works of Lovecraft, who'd died penniless and forgotten in 1937, were suddenly seeing a bit of revival of popularity. A burgeoning geek culture scene and a flood of cheap paperbacks reprinting his old stories brought him to a new audience, and with it came a renewed popularity among the kind of people who watch American International Pictures movies for fun. Corman's The Haunted Palace was, as far as I know, the very first adaptation of Lovecraft to film, nevermind the title ripped off from Poe. While cosmic horror in general was not new to film — you can find examples of it in films like The Fly, The Crawling Eye and arguably The Blob — it wasn't until the 1960s that cosmic horror began to develop as a distinct film genre.
So here we are with Die, Monster, Die! — incredible title by the way — an extremely loose adaptation of The Colour From Out of Space with a touch of The Dunwich Horror. The plot goes like this: a young American private detective visits his British girlfriend at her family's estate. Nobody in the village will talk to him or even let him rent a bicycle up to the mansion; something lurks in the garden, his girlfriend's father (played by Boris Karloff, who at this point in his career was quite frail) keeps insisting that he leave, and her mother refuses to be seen except behind a thick veil around her bed. Strange things are happening around the mansion: distant screams, the maid is uncharacteristically nowhere in sight, and the loyal butler at one point just dropping dead. Determined to get to the bottom of things, our hero and his girlfriend break into the old greenhouse, where they discover what her father has been up to: mutation experiments using the radiation from mysterious rocks, clearly chipped off from a larger piece.
As it turns out — not that you couldn't have guessed from what story this is based on — that larger piece is a mysterious meteorite that crashed into the gardens, and was being kept stored in the manor's cellar vault in hopes of its mutative properties bringing prosperity to the garden and restoring the family name after the girlfriend's grandfather apparently got up to something awful back in the day (which seems to be the main reason nobody in town wants anything to do with the family, not that this is ever really gone into in-depth.)
Die, Monster, Die! is pure AIP schlock: canned soundstages, clunky acting, goofy (yet somehow effective) special effects — the caged mutants in the greenhouse are freaky! — and Boris Karloff trying to pay rent. The Nicholas Cage film this ain't; but that's fine too. It's got it all: monster plants! mysterious meteorite! mind controlled mutants! radiation! A weird, vintage gothic horror with a touch of nuclear-age sensibilities. Much like The Haunted Palace before it, it's not likely to wind up on anyone's must-see cosmic horror list, but it's got its charms.
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