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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Friday, February 1, 2013

Sound Of Horror (1964)

Starring James Philbrook, Arturo Fernandez, Soledad Miranda, Jose Bodalo, Antonio Casas
Directed by Jose Antonio Nieves Conde
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

Treasure hunters track the burial place of an ancient fortune to a cave in Greece, but in excavating the cave, they accidentally unleash an invisible prehistoric monster.

In my opinion, this is a really fun movie, and delivers great suspenseful horror on a small budget.  Most criticisms of this film that I've heard center on the fact that it relies on a cheap monster (an invisible dinosaur) as its showpiece, and because of that is somehow cheating the audience.  On the contrary, I think it's to the film's credit that the filmmakers illustrate the creature's menace only through sound (a very terrifying roar) and the brutal assaults upon its victims, heightening the tension and making us imagine what the creature must look like.  I also liked how the film takes time to interest us in its characters, three stubborn adventurers who have spent the bulk of their lives trying to track down the fortune the creature protects, and have regrets that they have missed out on life because of it.

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