Long dismissed as the problem child of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, chiefly because it lacked Vincent Price, Premature Burial is actually a total gas. It does struggle to overcome major casting problems: Ray Milland as antihero Guy, convinced he’s doomed to be buried alive, is fairly flat in a role Price would have crash-tackled, and
Hazel Courtisn’t nearly as awesome as the secretly cruel wife aiming to exterminate her husband as Barbara Steele was in Pit and the Pendulum.
But these lacks prod Corman to some of his most gaudily stylish staging, aiming for the deliciously über-gothic, aided by a strong production and a thoroughly stylised approach, which builds in sinister intensity to a cracking finale, in which the worst thing Guy feared comes about, only for fate to liberate him in a homicidal rage in a plot arc highly similar to Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead. One suspects Corman knew the debt and paid it by casting Alan Napier, who’s in both. Floyd Crosby’s camerawork is particularly excellent, tracking and swooping with verve and visual concision.
Along the way we get Guy’s priceless self-built crypt equipped with every escape method you can think of, many a moment in the hilariously foggy and twisted landscape that surrounds Guy’s house as if the building is located somewhere within his decaying id, an hilarious comeuppance for Napier’s sleazy paterfamilias, and one of Corman’s best trippy dream sequences, in which Guy imagines all of those methods failing through decay, a vivid vision of the hopelessly depressed mind’s unfailing morbidity. And it’s that utterly disproportionate morbidity that’s vital for Poe.
The film finds a creepy leitmotif in the jaunty tune “Molly Malone”, whistled by the two sleazy, Burke and Hare-esque grave-robbers whose midnight peregrinations are sponsored by Guy’s father-in-law (Napier), an eminent surgeon who’s as happy to use Guy’s body in experiments as anybody else, neatly exposing Guy’s blindness to his own situation even as he tries to take control of his intensely corrosive fears. There’s also an affecting performance by ’30s starlet Heather Angel as Guy’s sister, left guilty and withered by trying to keep Guy’s prodigious talents and fears in balance. Strongly plotted and more quickly paced than several of the other series entries, Burial is sheerly entertaining.
