Little to Shock Here
Horror director James Garrick (John Nolan), a direct descendant of Lord and Lady Garrick, is showing his friends a horror movie involving a witch placing a curse on a family for burning her at the stake. It is something which Garrick believes in as he is convinced his family are under this curse but his friend Gary (Michael Craze) thinks is utter nonsense. Shortly after one of James's other guests in a state of hypnosis attacks Gary with James' family sword. It seems the witches curse is coming true and James along with many of his posh friends are in danger.
"Terror" starts with a movie within a movie, not that you know it when you start to watch and whilst the scenes of this movie within a movie are not overly original they are of a reasonable standard. Sounds wrong but those reasonable movie within a movie scenes are the best that "Terror" gets as following this the script all but goes walkies and the movie turns exploitation as we get one murder after another, usually at the hand of a knife with the killer remaining unseen. If that sounds generic then in truth it is and utterly tacky to boot.
Now I am no expert on the movies of Norman J. Warren but what I have read is that his previous movies were superior to this and I can believe it. "Terror" has that feeling of a movie made by someone who worked out what scenes worked in their previous movies and set about delivering them but ignoring the basics of storyline, characters and in the case of this movie which has mystery it lacks atmosphere as well. And it is why all it ends up coming across as is a show reel for exploitative horror scenes which frankly lack any sort of power when stumbled across now almost 40 years later.
What this all boils down to is that "Terror" is one of those movies which doesn't come across like anything more than a collection of exploitative horror scenes with not enough thought having gone in to the storyline or characters to really string them together.
