Brilliant and touching

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The Dungeon of Harrow (1962) BOMB (out of 4)Aaron Fallon (Russ Harvey) survives a shipwreck and washes up on an island. He wonders around before reaching a castle owned by Count Lorente de Sade (William McNulty) who is hiding some dark secrets about his family.THE DUNGEON OF HARROW is a really awful movie that has somewhat gained a cult following over the years. This was apparently a very popular film on television back in the 1970s, which means that a lot of kids would watch it and keep its memory alive through the years. Today the film is basically remembered for how bad it is and it really does deserve that reputation because there's really not too many good things you can say about it.The biggest issue with the film is that it's deadly dull to the point where most people aren't going to be able to stay with it. The film basically has the Aaron character narrating the whole thing so we have to hear his non-stop thoughts and there's no question that the screenwriter got a major workout because there's pretty much nothing but dialogue here. It's poorly written and the narration of it is so dull that it just kills the film even more.Another problem is that it's clear the director didn't know how to make a movie as scenes drag on for no reason, often times you feel as if you're watching an outtake and just take a look at the opening shipwreck! This here has to be one of the worst looking special effects ever used for a film. The performances are also just as bad but for some strange reason I think they're the best thing in the movie. Yes, they are quite awful but at the same time they're so numbing that you almost can deal with them.I will say that there are some "so bad they're good" looking make-up effects at the end but by the time they show up most people will be bored to the point where they've turned the film off. THE DUNGEON OF HARROW is a really cheap attempt at trying to make a Corman-Poe picture but it pretty much fails on every level.

Slow-talking non-actors make little attempt to turn this dreadful bore into a piece of art. Speaking from a script that unsuccessfully tries to be literary, they sound like an old Shakespeare acting troop reading his words for the first time. It all surrounds the discovery of evil goings on in the castle of a demented count and the horrific tortures he inflicts on his enemies. Cheaply made on ghostly looking sets, this needs more than that to be a decent macabre tale. Overlong and tedious, this seems to have a cult following, but who could make it through this more than once. The storyline makes little sense, and when it does, it reminds me of many horror classics which were done better. Yes, at times, there are a few genuine chills involving bats, snakes and cruelly violent activities, but that doesn't make at all for a satisfying movie. Bad sound makes it headache inducing. There have been better movies on the legend of the Marquis DeSade (particularly a ghost story with Mickey Shaugnessy), while here, he seems to be a parody of Boris Karloff. Having the hero being a shipwrecked captain is an obvious retread of other recent horror films which were nowhere as pretentious as this tried to be.

"Dungeon of Harrow contains sequences so degrading that they surpass your worst nightmares"… Ha ha, right! Behold some of the lies and nonsense they dare to put on DVD boxes in order to lure unsuspecting horror fans. The only things "Dungeon of Harrow" contains are dreadfully overlong and boring sequences, practically inaudible dialogs, semi- processed sub plots and a budget so small the crew probably couldn't even afford cream in their coffees! This is seriously one of the most infuriatingly dull and incompetent movies I've seen in a large number of years, but for some incomprehensible reason, it still appears to have a modest cult-following. This is mainly because its writer/director Pat Boyette was also a comic book artist. I'm not familiar with his work, but I sure hope it's better than his filmmaking skills. The film opens with two men, an obnoxious aristocrat and a sea captain, washing ashore an island as sole survivors after their ship got wrecked in a storm. The island belongs to the utterly bonkers Count Lorente de Sade, who has overlong conversations with his evil persona whilst his wife is rotting away from leprosy in the basement. De Sade also has a couple of loyal servants, including a large black man with white hair and a cute brunette. The voluptuous blond illustrated on the DVD-cover naturally doesn't appear at all. Anyway, the castaways naturally run into conflict with the crazed count and end up in the torture dungeon. Sounds very exciting and all, but we actually don't get to witness any torture. Worse, in fact, the entire movie doesn't even feature a moment of suspense or a glimpse of morbidity. The only nice touch is the leprosy sub plot, but Pat Boyette doesn't even have the courage to properly exploit that controversial theme. The cast is an assembly of amateurish volunteers. The guy depicting Count de Sade shows a resemblance to Boris Karloff in that period, which is probably why he got the part. c

A couple of men are ship-wrecked on a remote island. They are then captured by an insane count who lives there with a small group of servants; while in the castle dungeon lives the count's unfortunate leper wife.The Dungeon of Harrow is pretty much a hack job of a movie. The amateur actors all sleepwalk through the film while an annoyingly insistent score continually plays in the background. The various bits of action are all filmed in an incredibly unenergetic way; in fact the film in general is completely lethargic. It just seems to drag on and on. And even though the ending isn't too bad you will be hard-pressed to care by that point. As an example of 60's Gothic horror, this is strictly a bargain basement example. I sadly can't recommend this one really.