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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Bargain basement scarer that overcomes its limitations once or twice., 22 March 2001
Author: reptilicus from Vancouver, Canada

Here we have a film that looks like it was filmed over a long weekend. We know right away what we are in for during a storm-at-sea scene when the ships captain (Henry Garcia) bangs on a passengers door and the whole plywood set shakes. This is followed by a shot of a miniature ship in someones swimming pool. Stick around, this one has just GOT to be fun. Sure enough, the captain (Mr. Garcia who also co-wrote and co-produced) and Mr. Fallon (Russ Harvey) son of the ships owner, find themselves washed up on the island of Count DeSade (Bill McNulty). The Count has a little problem . . .he's crazy and terribly paranoid, believing everyone who comes to his island is a pirate. The captain soon finds himself imprisoned in the castle torture chamber while Fallon and Count DeSade's nurse Cassandra (Helen Hogan) try to plot a way off the island of madness. Directed by Pay Boyette, the artist who drew "Howard The Duck", this is the sort of movie Drive-In Cinema managers lived for. An early scene stresses how insane Count DeSade is. He sees a ghostly figure (Lee Morgan, a late night TV horror show host who gets "Guest Star" billing) who claims to be a physical incarnation of his own madness and sees snakes and giant spiders. The prolonged torture of the captain gets pretty tough to watch as the film goes on but the encounter between Fallon and DeSade's leprous, mad wife (Eunice Grey) is truly nightmarish.

Performances are . . .well . . .everyone does the best they can, which sadly is not saying much. Michele Buquor is okay as Anne, mute servant girl. In a nod to the 1960's she is miniskirted and barefoot like a time transplanted hippie chick. Standing out is Maurice Harris as Mantis, the count's devoted servant. he gets some of the best dialog in the picture and his line just before he dies is a sleaze movie classic. Lovers of low budget scary movies owe it to themselves to see this one at least once. No, make that twice; you'll want to see it again to make sure you weren't hallucinating the first time.

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7 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Dungeon of Harrow (1962) *, 3 July 2004
2/10
Author: JoeKarlosi from U.S.A.

Okay, make no mistake - this is a pretty awful film, but I actually thought it had a couple of creepy scenes and overcame its pathetic budget every now and then. At the very least it's unintentionally funny in spots and has a definite air of creepiness and discomfort (a face burning scene, the part with the disfigured bride).

This baby falls into the "so bad it's entertaining" category to me, and for that alone I would give it a star. The effects are terrible, the acting is abysmal, and the whole thing looks like it was shot in a day. You gotta love that toy ship at the beginning, too! It brought back childhood memories of seeing this on late night TV many years ago. While the Alpha DVD print looks weak and as though it was recorded directly off an old television broadcast or something, I actually liked that in this case!

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Soft porn moment edited out, 27 May 2006
Author: cewilsonjr from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Wondering why the scene on the Alpha DVD where Ann (the servant girl) and Fallon were making out for a brief moment looks like it has been cut? It was cut on the TV station copy the DVD was made from because Ann bared her breasts for Fallon (and the viewers) when she came into his room. The first time I saw this movie was in the early 70's on the local UHF station in Baltimore. It must have been the first time they had shown it (and must not had previewed it, thinking it was just a low-budget horror flick), because nothing from the scene was edited out. On the DVD, you see her at the door with her top undone and cleavage showing, and then it cuts to the two of them making out before Fallon pulls away. In the uncut version that I saw, she walks in and opens her top even more to expose her breasts as she offers herself to him. I was in my early teens in the days before cable and the internet, so you could imagine about how I could not believe how I had lucked out and seen this! I told my friends about it soon after, and they thought I was making it up. Next time the movie came on I tipped them off that it was going to be shown again, but the TV station had gotten wise to it and edited out the bare breasts. Needless, to say we were a disappointed bunch, but at least my friends saw that something had been cut out. Anybody else get to see the unedited scene back when the movie first started being shown on TV? This might just start a hunt to see if there's still an uncut copy still in existence...

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
a throwback to 30s/40s B-horror films, 15 June 2003
Author: bukakkefriedchicken from fabulous Las Vega$!

Could "Dungeon of Harrow" really be from the 60s? Everything about it (besides the fact that it's in color)- has the distinctive look of the horror films made by Republic or Monogram during and shortly after the depression. Hilarious model ship in a storm effects are the most fun part of an otherwise rather dull movie that makes fairly good use of gothic sets...other than that, not much reason to recommend this to anyone, really...too tame for trash-film lovers, and below the quality expectations of true horror fans. Completists of cheap horror obscurities may find this of minor interest. 1.5*/5*...for the face burning scene alone.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Harrowing indeed, 23 August 2002
3/10
Author: Flixer1957 (wtr4423@juno.com) from Columbia County, NY

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

**May Contain Spoilers**

The main character, a nobleman named Fallon, is stranded on an island with characters so looney and lethal he might have been better off drowning. Count Lorente de Sade (pronounced "dee-SAYd") talks to his own hallucinations and sees all intruders on the island as invading pirates. He routinely beats mute servant Anne and tortures his unwilling guests in the dungeon. Inadvertant laughs are provided by giant "Nubian" slave Mantis who talks with a Deep South accent and helps de Sade hunt down trespassers in the style of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. De Sade's crazed wife, ravaged by leprosy, provides some truly scary moments as she prowls the dungeon and embraces a helplessly chained prisoner. (This scene was viewed on late-night TV by many kids who carried the memory into adulthood.) The one nearly-normal person in sight is Cassandra, who has self-deprecation down to a science. ("I used to be a nurse, now I'm not much of anything.") She and Fallon plan their escape and ultimately encounter an enemy more fearsome than de Sade and Mantis combined.

This movie was shot in San Antonio and directed by a man more competent at drawing horror comics than making horror movies. (I'll say this much for Mr. Boyette--he does showcase his fixatation with contagion here, as he did in his comics.) It's rather like an Andy Milligan melodrama minus the meat cleavers. The period wardrobe, library music, abuse of the handicapped and all-around misanthropy makes one wonder if Andy wasn't called in as a consultant. However, Milligan made better costumes and wrote better dialogue. Technical gaffes are too numerous to list here but you know this flick is in trouble when you see the opening shipwreck, which looks like it was shot in a fish tank. Also, a film made in Texas should have had real spiders and snakes rather than rubber ones. Glorious Eastmancolor gives this melodrama the garish look it so richly deserves. Fallon's initial encounter with the leprous Countess is truly horrifying, as is the movie's parting shot. If the rest had been half as harrowing, THE DUNGEON OF HARROW would have been a terror classic. Instead it's a funny piece of schlock that trash-fiends will love, for all the wrong reasons.

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7 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Whatsamatter With You People??, 11 October 2005
7/10
Author: Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) from New York, USA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Reading the other user comments posted about this odd, compelling little shocker, you think someone had put a gun to the heads of the people who have written in and forced them to watch this under threat of death, like they had no choice or were unable to find a remote control and the OFF button. You'd also think that they were judging the movie based on it's merits, or lack thereof, and no critiquing the crummy little DVDs they glommed onto. One dollar for a DVD, and it STILL doesn't rise to your expectations? What were you expecting -- CITIZEN KANE? Maybe FITZCARRALDO? There is a reason why public domain movies always look like crap, and that is that nobody owns them, the transfers bopping around are all 30+ years old or older, and you're lucky to see the film at all or that it was ever even made. If you want quality, go buy yourself the remastered KING KONG DVD. Stop picking on stuff like DUNGEON OF HARROW.

The film was made over forty-three years ago for less money than an average year of college tuition costs these days. The cast consists of maybe seven people, of which six have lines. Most of the film consists of people talking, and while there is no direct literary chain of evidence the content speaks of Edgar Allan Poe, who would have adored this atmospheric, amoral and at times gleefully sadistic little chiller. The film looks unreal, or like a nightmare or dream, with distorted colors, bizarre lighting and a voice over narration like someone thinking to themselves, reciting a nightmare as it unwinds in their mind's eye. The film has a quality to it that borders on surrealism, like figures swimming against a backdrop of half recognized shapes and outlines that just happen to resemble rooms or torture dungeons.

I love movies like this, bizarre, obscure little morality plays that exist as chains of moments rather than a boringly predictable story. Not everyone can make Harry Potter movies and not every director is interested in the same agendas. Some directors work to make visceral documents of moods or atmospheres, and that is what I feel is going on here. The story is actually irrelevant, which is why I am not discussing it. What is relevant is the almost overwhelming sense of dread, decay and madness that the film cultivates. It is claustrophobic, deliberately paced, sonorous and perhaps even a bit boring. I wish it was even MORE boring and that even less happened: The atmospheric use of fog and torture racks and indentured slavery that make up the legend of horror that the film recites is still extremely potent even with the faded, tattered, color rotted fullframe TV print transferred to home video decades before it ended up as a DVD.

I am not defending this movie, mind you, I am praising it. I am praising the director for having had the audacity to make it with so very little, the producers for allowing it to be made when there were idiotic B or C grade Westerns that could have been made with the same money and done more at the box office, and even the DVD companies that managed to dig up the old master used for their stupid little DVD. God bless 'em all, and to hell with BATMAN BEGINS or whatever other overblown, self important and soulless garbage is being shoveled out the door on DVD today -- packed with seven hours of extra stuff to watch and distract you from how shallow, empty and uninteresting the film itself is. Here's one for a dollar and it is a marvel of imagination, ingenuity and invention by comparison. It doesn't have any stars, it isn't very exciting and hard to put out of the mind afterward. That's why it's a masterpiece of one sort or another, and I'd rather be shipwrecked on an island with a box full of stuff like this than the entire collected works of Peter Jackson, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg combined. Whats that, like 12 movies in all?

7/10, though sadly, you apparently need a brain to get it.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
This one can sting...you have to be in the right mood to appreciate this, 3 June 2006
2/10
Author: lemon_magic from Wavy Wheat, Nebraska

My bad film guru (and the president of the Exposed Film Society) sprang this one on us last week. There was no denying the demented gleam in his eye as he pulled it out of its brown paper bag and announced what he had in store for us: "The Most Dangerous Game", filmed on a budget of about $2.95.

Of course, $2.95 went a lot further back in 1962, but still...

Anyway, there is certainly a lot to dislike about this film. It abounds with serious technical gaffes (my favorite was the 'repeating musket' that fired twice in two minutes without benefit of a reload). The hero is a wuss who stands by while his wounded friend fights the henchman and gets killed.

More? OK -The plot is a shambles with no continuity to speak of. The movie wastes five minutes with a 'special guest star' who serves as the physical embodiment of the villain's madness and paranoia, but never shows him again. The hero is choked unconscious by the henchman but makes no mention of it when he wakes up and first meets his host. The mute servant girl is captured, put on the rack...and then the movie (and the hero, who put her in this predicament) just sort of "forgets" about her.

More? Well, the sets are cheap, and the special effects are cheaper (the makeup is an exception to this). Much of the plot is carried by the narrator's droning, monotonic voice-over, which carries less dramatic impact than the menu recital at Denny's. Most of the dialog is simply ridiculous and stilted , as if it was translated from Japanese. ("I demand that our conversation be pleasant!!!") And the color values tended to shift violently from shot to shot, as if cheap film stock and problematic lighting equipment were the order of the day. (Note - this last may have been the fault of a bad print, rather than the camera crew).

But there were a couple of nice moments here and there. The makeup effects were startlingly good in contrast to the rest of the film, the actors were LOOKED interesting, especially the mute servant girl and the Countess. And in spite of everything, there was a definite creepy atmosphere to be found, very nasty and disturbing.

So what was the deal with this movie? I thought about it a bit, and realized that director/writer Pat Boyette basically tried to put a story from of the old "EC" horror comics on film. That would account for the stilted dialog, the sketchy character development (in a comic, physiognomy = character even more than in film), the loopy interior logic of the story ("EC" horror stories went out of their way to include a nasty "shock" ending and weren't big on psychological realism), the over reliance on the narrative voice (which belongs in captions over the panels), and the interesting makeup effects that mimicked the grisly pictures that the old EC artists did so well.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that when Boyette saw his leading man during casting, he instantly saw that the fellow was as close to being the equivalent of the lanky, shambling figures and caved in faces that artists like Johnny Craig and Jack Davis drew as an actual human could be and still exist in the real world.. He used costumes and lighting to emphasize the cartoony aspect of the visuals and turned everyone into living EC comics characters. (See: the leading lady's blank beauty, the Count's strong bony features, oddly bronze skin and sharp chin, the platinum 'do on the tall, bony black henchman, etc.)

This would explain the movie's failings. Boyette knew how to 'frame' things, but he didn't know how to deal with three dimensions and moving bodies. Boyette knew how to tell a creepy story within the confines of a comics page, but the nuances of film and live actors escaped him. He wouldn't be the first person with this problem of course - look at what Joel Schumacher did to "Batman". But he didn't have a big budget to hide behind.

In any case, I'm imagine that Boyette walked away from this train wreck and probably spent less time thinking about "Dungeon of Harrow"than the folks who post on this film's message boards. He did, within certainly vague boundaries, what he set out to do, and you have to respect him for it...even if you don't care for "Harrow".

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
A good idea that goes nowhere, 27 March 2003
2/10
Author: Craig Burkhart from Crawfordsville, Indiana

The basic idea behind "Dungeon of Harrow" isn't all bad. The acting, however, is bad. The lighting is bad. The music is bad. The scenes of torture are without emotion. There really isn't much there to recommend this film. You know what kind of a movie you're in for when the credits say "Special Guest Star" and list someone you've never heard of. Might as well say "Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln." because there's really no one in this movie you can identify. There are one or two decent moments, mostly toward the end and I think the basic plot outline may have contained an original idea, but that alone is not enough to keep you awake through this otherwise inept yawner.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Some comments on the DVD quality, 5 April 2008
2/10
Author: rwagn from Columbus, Ohio

Buyer beware. The Alpha Video release uses a print that defies description. The movie was shot in color but you wouldn't know it for the first 25 minutes or so. The print that is used is so faded and decrepit that it appears almost sepia toned. After 30 minutes some color seeps back into the print but from there to the conclusion the color comes and goes. Keep in mind, even at it's best the color is pale and washed out. It looks like the print was recorded off a television that wasn't getting the best reception. Adding to this travesty is the most plodding delivery of lines that I can recollect. Even the voice over narration is stupor inducing. Every line is delivered in this irritating plodding demeanor. I found myself wishing that they would hurry and get the words out. For this reason I couldn't wait for this movie to end. It's one of those so-bad -it's- good movies but I wish that someone would find a half decent print.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Give It A Try, Really! Ignore Those Other People!, 18 March 2006
7/10
Author: reluctantpopstar from Hollyweird

I've seen me a lot of bad movies, and I've seen me a lot of low budget movies.

Note: those two are NOT necessarily the same! I shouldn't even have to say this, but everyone who has watched at least a few movies (and that includes almost everyone in the United States), has had this experience; you go to a theater or turn on a movie channel. What you get is either a huge budget major studio film that is oddly hollow, perfunctory and disappointing; or a film that is entertaining in spite of its low budget, transcending its limitations.

The latter is what we get here. In the world of low budget film-making, there are a few "cheats" that can be used to make up for a lack of sumptuous screen images. One is great acting. Another is great writing. We are not treated to either of those in DUNGEON OF HARROW.

But we are treated to a creepy, hallucinatory atmosphere which is quite effective, and gives the viewer a bang for the buck infinitely out of proportion with its tiny budget. Remember, this is (to speak simplistically) a period Gothic horror film shot in Texas in 1963 for a budget under $50,000. Keeping that in mind, the filmmakers and actors have come up with quite a laudable final product. Fans of CARNIVAL OF SOULS can expect similar chills on a small budget, though COS is a much better film.

For a couple of bucks, or in a cheap DVD box set, this film is well worth your time if you like late show type horror thrills.

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