DVD Review: Trilogy of Terror - Page 3

While the first two stories, adapted by William F. Nolan, may seem cliche today, they were highly original back in 1975. In the first story, Julie, Karen Black plays a reserved, plain-looking English professor who unwillingly becomes embroiled in a sexual tango with one of her students. Or so it seems. In the second story, Millicent and Therese, Ms. Black plays two sisters at polar opposites in their personalities, and heading for a violent confrontation because of it.Richard Matheson wisely chose to write the screenplay for Amelia, the third episode which is based on his short story Prey. And it is this story that stands out as an important and memorable entry in cinematic horror. Indeed, in the audio commentary provided by Nolan and Black, Nolan jokes how he was always congratulated for the Amelia episode — the one he didn't write — when approached by fans. He eventually stopped telling fans he didn't write it, and just accepted their appreciation. The story is that good.

Take a lone woman, psychologically battered by her mother, add a little present wrapped in a curiously odd-looking box for her anthropology boyfriend, and toss in a warning not to remove the little chain that holds the savage warrior spirit at bay, and you have a simple recipe for ... disaster!As the chain falls from the little — but hideously visaged — doll, you know what's coming. Curtis builds it slowly, with a little foreshadowing as Amelia cuts her finger on the very sharp spear the doll carries. After her bath, Amelia, dressed only in a bathrobe, notices the doll is no longer on the table. Curtis also changes the camera angle, and moves it lower to the floor, heightening our knowing fears of what is to come.

As Amelia reaches under the couch she again gets cut, and reaching further, pulls out the spear. Even with the lights on, her apartment is dark — Dan Curtis dark, and Cobert's music starts to hit its ominously strident tones. Out of the corner of her eye, a shadow scampers across the floor. She begins to suspect something crazy is going on, and just before you can say Zuni Fetish Warrior, the lights go out, and the bolt on her front door is reshaped into a pretzel, trapping her in the apartment.

The first frenetic attack is sudden, loud, and brings her down to floor level as the little savage uses a knife swiped from the kitchen counter to stab her feet and ankles again and again. The rushing of the little doll, screaming as it attacks her again and again, is still amazingly effective and scary. Locking herself in the bathroom does no good, as the little monster is very resourceful. She tries to drown it in the bathtub, but that also fails. The scene as it climbs out of the tub, with the big knife firmly gripped in its mouth, borders on almost funny, but Curtis' direction keeps this story deadly serious. Karen Black, speaking in the Three Colors Black featurette on the DVD, describes the fear of vaginal entry that this episode plays on. She also mentions the humorous troubles the special effects people had in animating the little bugger. In the first attack, where she stumbles to the floor, she describes how they had trouble keeping the limbs on the doll as they rapidly pulled it along the floor. In the scene where it clamps down on her neck, she also describes how she had to hold onto it and act like it was alive and biting her. In the hands of lesser talent, this episode would have become a quirky absurdity; instead, it remains one of the most intense sessions in terror committed to the small screen.

Article Author: ILoz Zoc

Founder of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers (LOTT D), expiring writer of Zombos Closet of Horror Blog, and valet to Zombos, the noted B-movie horror actor (to his few remaining and decaying fans).

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