Monster of Terror

Haller's highly enjoyable debut as a director is a slow, moody, loose adaptation of HP Lovecraft's marvellous story The Colour Out of Space, with Karloff (excellent, as usual) as the scientist attempting, with the aid of a strange meteorite (it causes plant life to grow monstrously and organisms to mutate) to invoke the Dark Powers to return to rule the earth again. Not surprisingly, given that Haller served as art director on Corman's Poe cycle, his film features much the same battery of ground fogs, dank passageways, and vaulted stone chambers. He uses these effectively enough, but adds some even better effects of his own, notably the vision of desolate wasteland which surrounds the warlock's domain, and the greenhouse in which he secretes the monstrous, throbbing organisms he has created.