With the surprise success of Roger Corman's Poe Cycle it was only natural to expect AIP to turn to the works of HP Lovecraft to be milked for their money-spinning Gothics. Indeed, one of the "Poe Cycle" (1963's The Haunted Palace) had actually been a - very good - Lovecraft adaptation made to resemble a Poe tale.
Rather than Corman (who had left the Gothics behind and was working on his legendary Biker film The Wild Angels - "We wanna be free...to do what we wanna do..."), AIP left their next Lovecraft production in the hands of Corman's regular Art Director, the man who gave the Poe Cycle its famous look, Daniel Haller. Die, Monster, Die! was his directorial début.
The film took Lovecraft's seminal Science Fiction shocker The Color Out Of Space as its source, and loosely adapted it into a strange film indeed! The leads are a wheelchair-bound Boris Karloff (giving a lovely turn, but hardly at his peak) and pixie-faced TV journeyman Nick Adams (who is direly miscast), whilst Suzan Farmer makes a winsome Woman In Peril. There's also a small part for Patrick Magee, ideally cast as a gruff, resentful, drunken doctor!
The setting is moved across the Atlantic, with Arkham now a sweet little English country village, yet with the obligatory Crumbling Gothic Pile (TM) - ancestral seat of Karloff's family, source of diabolical rites and host to the film's action. There are many familiar Gothic clichés but here with the added bonus of radioactive mutation! Whereas Lovecraft's tale was a seamless blend of Weird Horror and proto-Science Fiction, the film presents rather a clumsy attempt to meld the two genres. The result is a picture that never quite seems sure what it is trying to be.
It's not totally bad, it's an enjoyable enough curio if you can get past Nick Adams's cardboard blundering. It looks lovely, as you would expect from Haller, and is otherwise an affable if unchallenging way to pass the time.
When it was released it was shoved into a double bill (with Mario Bava's Alien blueprint Planet Of The Vampires! What a weird SF horror double that must have been!) possibly indicating that confidence was low at AIP. By the time it hit the UK it had a new title - Monster Of Terror - in a bid to lure an audience. I don't think it ever performed especially well!
So, not a great film, but interesting and worth a watch. a shame really, as you can't help but feel there is potential within and that the old money/time issues let it down. Lovecraft would fare much better with AIP and Haller's next attempt, The Dunwich Horror.
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