Very Cool!!!

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Horror of It All, The (1963) * (out of 4) Terence Fisher directed this incredibly bad "old dark house" film, which tries to blend the scares with laughs. The story is pretty simple as a man (Pat Boone) goes to visit his girlfriend and her uncle inside a strange house and soon mysterious activities start. This film borrows heavily from many of the old dark house films of the 1930's but it fails on pretty much every level. The laughs are never funny and the director never builds up any worthy atmosphere, which leads the horror elements very boring. Boone is horrible in the lead but the supporting cast does include Dennis Price and Valentine Dyall (Horror Hotel).

I have to disagree with the poster who suggested that "Horror of It All" is neglected because it was filmed in black and white. "Dr. Strangelove" and "A Hard Day's Night," two black and white films which came out the following year, didn't seem to suffer from the lack of color. "Horror of It All" is neglected because it's a stinker. Pat Boone was never a threat to Olivier, and here he is encouraged (or allowed) to overact embarrassingly. The sets are cheap, the costumes are cheesy and the script is awful. And Terence Fisher, a first-rate director of horror films, seemed to have no flair for comedy (and got no help from the script). Neglect in this case is benign.

It's even more depressing when you consider the talent behind the camera--Terence Fisher did this??? I won't bother to get into the plot. It's a "horror comedy" (I use both terms very loosely) about an old, dark house and a bunch of idiots running around doing lame slapstick and unfunny jokes. Badly acted, directed and written. Go see "Hold That Ghost" or "An American Werewolf in London" or "The Howling". Even the remake of "The Old Dark House"! They're all prime examples of how to do horror and comedy.

This film, almost impossible to find today, has received a bad rap since its day of release, and maybe before, since the distributors put it on the bottom of a double bill with Lon Chaney's "Witchcraft." The temptation to dismiss this film is strong, but its pedigree is impossible to ignore. Genre master Terence Fisher is at the helm, during his unofficial banishment from Hammer Films; Ray Russell wrote the script; and the cast includes Valentine Dyall from "Horror Hotel"/"City of the Dead", Andree Melly, one of the "Brides of Dracula" and British stalwart Dennis Price, just beginning his flirtation with the horror genre.So what went wrong?The film's greatest offense is undoubtedly that it was made in black & white during the era when movies were going all-color in a big way. It's co-feature likewise; and that was a film that everyone liked and it still slipped into obscurity.The casting of Pat Boone has stuck in the craws of many horror fans but, truthfully, he's as palatable as Tom Poston is in "Zotz" and 1963's "The Old Dark House". And Boone's boyish screen persona is just right for the kind of hapless hero he plays here. He does sing a totally unnecessary song, however.Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film is its similarity to two other films made about the same time: Hammer's "The Old Dark House", made the same year, and "What A Carve Up" (AKA "There's No Place Like Homicide") from 1962. The plot similarities, especially with the Hammer film, are so strong that it's a wonder how the persons concerned avoided lawsuits.