Fear Chamber - 1/5

A few years ago I was browsing through my local Borders store and a certain DVD cover grabbed my attention. The DVD cover that jumped out at me was for the film Fear Chamber. The DVD cover featured the original poster art (and I am a sucker for old poster artwork) and it starred none other than Boris Karloff, one of my favorite old time horror film actors. It was on sale for 6.99 and without even reading the back of the box I decided to make a blind purchase. I believe Borders got the price wrong as it should have been 6.66 because only Satan himself would allow such a god awful piece of shit to ever disgrace the once good name of a likable horror actor.

The story line is this: a group of scientists discover a "living" rock while exploring a cave deep in the earth. This living rock come to find out lives off a hormone produced in the human body when the body feels fear. How the hell did it live so damn long in the earth? I have a hunch, just a hunch, that human fear hormones are extremely hard to come by hundreds of feet below the earth where, I don't know, it's too hot and crowded with dirt/rock for human beings to live!

The scientists want to keep the damn thing alive so they build this ultra high tech motel with a special room. After people go to bed, their bed turns around in a revolving wall and they wake up in a spook house (excuse me, I mean "Fear Chamber") complete with hellish looking midgets. After the guests pass out the scientists extract the hormone and feed it to the damn rock. However the rock gets greedy and soon craves more fear hormones, so it grows "rock tentacles" to capture live pray. Shouldn't this "rock" be classified as a living organism? I mean the line between "living" and "nonliving" is not some gray area. I think our scientists must have took a quickie Biology/Geology course and got their information just a little crossed.

Oh I forgot about Boris Karloff. I can't imagine why since he is BARELY in the damn thing. His scenes were obviously filmed separately than the rest of the film as he is usually in bed talking on the phone to other characters. It just brings a tear to my eye that this was Karloff's last film before death. I have a hunch his death was brought on after he was shown the final results of this monstrosity.

The only fear chamber this film creates is whatever room you happen to watch this awful film in. This film is what I like to call "alternative cinema". It's kind-of horror, it's kind-of exploitation, and all shit. To my surprise my DVD disc has a director's commentary. This is why I keep the disc as I have to know what was going through that guy's head to make such an unwatchable piece of drek. It takes real talent to make a film about a killer rock and not even have one ounce of B-movie likability. Not even the guys behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 could even have fun with this one. Avoid, even if you're a bad movie connoisseur.

Written By Eric Reifschneider