October 5 - The Tingler

I was a bit pressed for time today, so I had to pick something short. Crackle.com came through for me again. This time, it was The Tingler, a bit of a cheesy black and white horror flick with Vincent Price. Sure, this movie is older, but how can you understand the evolution of horror flicks if you don't study the classics? Besides, how can you have a month long review of horror movies without having at least ONE Vincent Price film in it?

Now Vincent Price is scary enough, but in this movie, he plays a scientist working as a coroner who is doing research on the emotion of fear. After doing a number of autopsies, he has come across clues that indicate there's a violent force behind fear itself, something strong enough to crack the spine of a healthy adult. A chance meeting with a theater owner leads to him to the theater owner's wife, a deaf-mute woman who is terrified by the sight of blood, but can't scream to release her fear. When Vincent accidentally cuts himself, she passes out from the sheer force of the emotion.

In an experiment to try and track down the source of the emotion, Vincent terrorizes his evil, cheating wife by threatening her with a gun until she faints, then gets x-rays of what he names "The Tingler" some sort of multi-legged insect that grows along the spine when any human being experiences fear, and then disappears once the fear is gone. Vincent begins experimenting with LSD in an effort to scare himself so he can experience the Tingler himself, but at the height of the experiment, he screams and ruins it.

The theater owner's wife, meanwhile, dies of fright, apparently experiencing horrible hallucinations that lead to her death. At first, I myself thought Vincent had gone around the bend, and was terrifying her with an injection of LSD and some simple monster movie props, but as it turns out, the theater owner scares her to death in an effort to rid himself of her and make off with her money. The theater owner brings her body to Vincent, and he examines her and recovers an actual Tingler! :-o Apparently the thing is made of a material denser than steel and is incredibly strong. Vincent can not hurt it by any means at his disposal, but before he can decide what to do with it, his wife drugs him and gets her revenge by letting it out next to his unconscious body.

It nearly kills him, but his niece's scream paralyzes the thing, and he decides such a creature needs to be returned to it's natural environment, where it can return to nothingness. He only has to re-implant it in the body of the theater owner's wife, but the Tingler escapes the confines of it's cage and gets into the theater! :-o

Yea, this movie isn't exactly Freddy Krueger here, and the cheesy parts are where the movie tries to directly inform the people watching the movie to scream to paralyze the Tingler (I was tempted to scream but I scream like a girl and I already have a sore throat, so I decided against it), but all in all, a pretty good attempt for a movie of it's time. If you like Vincent Price it's definitely worth a watch, and it's typical of horror movies back in those days, showcasing a scientist trying to solve life's problems instead of just making them worse. Like today's scientists. lol

Well that's it for this review! Let's see what I can find for tomorrow's horror movie! :-)