This is the 12th episode in my series on sf, fantasy and horror with San Antonio ties.
Just when you thought Knight Rider 2000 was scraping the bottom of the cinematic barrel when it came to San Antonio-lensed sf, fantasy and horror flicks, along comes Dungeon of Harrow.
In this 1962 drive-in disaster, the Alamo City subs for a desert island, where the wealthy protagonist washes up after a shipwreck. In a sign of the quality yet to come, the opening scenes of a the bobbing boat were obviously done with a toy in a pond or swimming pool. Just take a gander at the trailer.
Our hero soon finds himself in the castle (replete with the advertised dungeon of harrow) of the insane Count Lorente de Sade who seems intent on keeping him on the island. As if de Sade — who resembles an overly tanned game show host — isn’t creepy enough, he’s surrounded by an odd retinue that includes his Dennis Rodman-lookalike henchman Mantis, a mute servant girl and a wife ravaged by leprosy.
The plot is ludicrous, the pacing leaden and the acting ranges from passable to abysmal. To boot, the DVD transfer — with its weak audio and sporadically fading color — makes it look like it was taken directly off home video of a UHF broadcast.
And the movie has a following among fans of trash cinema — for just those reasons. There’s a certain scrappy charm to these kind of inept, zero-budget films that look like they were shot over a weekend.
The movie also might have added appeal to comics fans since its San Antonio-born director, Pat Boyette, eventually made a career in the comics industry. He spent the late ’60s through the mid ’80s drawing and sometimes writing a variety of superhero, Western, war, sf and horror titles for long-gone Charlton Comics.
DC Comics acquired Boyette’s nonviolent superhero The Peacemaker in the mid-1980s, and it became the basis for the Comedian in Alan Moore’s famed Watchmen comic series.
Boyette, who died in 2000, directed at least one more film, the lost sf-comedy The Weird Ones.
