The Premature Burial (1962) Way back in the nineteenth century when dinosaurs and cavemen co-existed
uneasily, man's greatest fear was being buried alive. Medical science wasn't
as evolved as it is today, so the ignorant masses were afraid that when they
took an afternoon siesta after a particularly large tankard of ale and gruel,
their overeager relatives would see this as a chance to get their mitts on all
their worldly possessions (lice-infested cloak, rusty shovel, and empty tankard
- stuff like that no doubt), proclaim the unfortunate chap dead and have the
little bugger all buried just before he wakes up wondering why the devil his
mouth is full of dirt and maggots are trying to move in on his soft parts.
Living in a futuristic society as we do now, we don't have to worry about such
primitive situations and instead have to contend with money-grubbing doctors
leaving their cell phones in our guts during operations because they're too
busy discussing their golf game with the stacked nurse and foreign
anesthesiologist. Thank God for progress.
The Premature Burial plays on this fear of being buried alive, um, prematurely, but more
importantly than that, it plays on the fear of a Roger Corman film based on a
Edgar Allan Poe work without Vincent Price. Do to some dastardly business
dealings, Roger went to some other company than American International Pictures
to make this movie, but Vinny was under contract to AIP so Roger had to settle
for Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland instead. Due to some further dastardly
business dealings and in one of those ironic twists usually reserved for movies
like this, the movie ended up at AIP anyway! Don't worry about Roger and
Vinny's relationship though - they would team up for four more pictures the
following year alone! And poor Ray? He would work again with Roger as well in X - The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, though I'm pretty sure he wished it had been The Man With Plugged Up Ears since one of his co-stars was that annoying hockey puck, Don Rickles.  The Premature Burial is an okay movie that doesn't suffer from Price's absence and probably is a
little more memorable than it would have been otherwise since it doesn't have
that overpowering sameness that so many of these Poe-Corman-Price pictures had.
(Which one was it that had Price playing that strange guy in that old creepy
house with that bizarre obsession? Exactly.) Everything else about the movie
is pretty standard issue for these sorts of things. Big ancestral home located
on the fog shrouded moors, hot young wife that can't understand why hubby's
nuts, stud doctor who hangs around hoping to nail hot young wife once hubby
goes completely bonkers, pets that get themselves into jams that foretell our
hero's own fate - all the good stuff is here.
 Milland is a guy by the name of Guy and he finally consents to marry his
sweetheart Emily after being very reluctant due to his fear of being buried
alive. Now, just how does an otherwise Oscar-winning actor suddenly develop
this obsession with being put down for his dirtnap before he's really tired?
He's convinced that his own father was buried before his time due to his
catalepsy. I went ahead and looked that one up since there was no way I could
figure out how a guy could be buried alive just because he had fits where he
flopped around on the floor meowing and it turns out that catalepsy is a
condition where a dude goes into a trance-like state with no reaction to
outside stimuli. Oh, so that's what happened to me while being subjected to
Ivan Zuccon's The Shunned House (psst - don't tell Ivan I said that! He's very sensitive!).
Guy's obsession really kicks into high gear when he attends a grave-robbing his
father-in-law is holding to get bodies for his medical research and it appears
that the guy in the coffin had tried to get out after being buried. Guy knows
there's only one way to avoid a similar fate and that's to build the most
advanced mausoleum the world has ever known! This is the best part of the
movie and veers into parody as Guy gives his wife and Dr. Stud a tour of all
his failsafes and backup systems he's built into it. Let's see. Collapsible
coffin? Check. Loud bell? Check. Secret door? Check. Rope ladder to roof?
Check. Food and reading material until someone comes and lets him out? Check.
Wet bar? Check. Dynamite to blow the whole business if all the secret and trap
doors stick? Check. Poison just in case everything else fails? Check.
Obsessive compulsive dude who needs a day job? Double check!  With all that in place, what could possibly go wrong? What else, but a nagging
wife? Emily threatens to leave him unless he gets rid of his pet mausoleum.
Guy reluctantly complies and is seemingly cured of his affliction, at least
until his poor puddy tat is discovered trapped in the walls of his house! A
lot of things you would expect follow as well as a double cross that felt a
little more than tacked on. (If you have a character breathlessly explaining
everything thirty seconds before the end of the movie after almost nothing in
the preceding 80 minutes lead up to that, you're in trouble.)
Strictly average
in a scope and execution, The Premature Burial feels like it was made to play on a double bill at the drive-in, so you're
lucky that you also get the Corman-Poe-Price triple threat match The Masque Of The Red Death on this DVD as well. The only impression this movie really left with me one
way or the other was that all of this would have been avoided if Guy just
convinced his relatives to leave him lying off in some room for about a week
after his apparent death and checked him to see if he re-animated himself every
so often. This film should induce only mild catalepsy in modern viewers.
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