The Terror (1963)

Starring Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson, Sandra Knight, Richard Miller, Dorothy Neumann
Directed by Roger Corman
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

After being separated from his regiment, a French soldier falls for a beautiful young woman, whom he learns is supposed to have died over twenty years ago.

The pairing of horror icon Karloff with Nicholson early in his career, who has since become an icon in his own right, sounds more attractive than it unfortunately is.  This is a low budget production with a dreary and meandering story, borrowing Karloff and the sets from Corman's filming of The Raven, which is a far better movie than this one.  It does have an excellent atmospheric music score from Ronald Stein to its credit, and Karloff and Nicholson are quite watchable.  However, they deserve a better showcase than this one.  Corman often worked wonders on a shoestring budget, and there's some worthy elements scattered throughout the picture, but they're just not integrated well enough to call this entertaining.  Still, at the very least, Peter Bogdanovich was able to reuse the footage from this movie in his excellent film Targets, which contains one of Karloff's best final performances.

Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)

Starring John Ashley, Sandra Knight, Donald Murphy, Sally Todd, Harold Lloyd Jr.
Directed by Richard Cunha
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.co

A kindly scientist fails to realize that his uncooperative assistant is actually a descendant of the infamous Frankenstein family, and is engaged in secret experiments of his own.

More famous for its laughable monster than anything else, (a stocky man plays the female monster with only some lipstick on to convey it's a lady), this low-budget effort from producer/director Richard Cunha seems an attempt to capitalize on the success of Herman Cohen's teenage monster movies.  Had they kept the focus on Sandra Knight's character after being transformed into an ugly creature after taking a potion from the film's villain, it might have been a more respectable effort but the filmmakers try to go all out with the titular creature and fail miserably.  Nevertheless, the picture brings the fun, particularly for fans of 1950s horror, and I must confess a certain fondness for the featured song, "Special Date," from Page Cavanaugh and His Trio, who would go to enjoy more success than this movie.

Blood Bath (1966)

Starring William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Lori Saunders, Sandra Knight, Carl Schanzer
Directed by Jack Hill & Stephanie Rothman
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

An artist who paints gruesome depictions of murdered women hides the secret that he is a vampire and the women he paints are in fact his murder victims.

This horror film from Roger Corman's production unit is hard to judge without acknowledging it's history.  As related in Wikipedia's entry on this film, it originated as a spy thriller, which was then refashioned by director Jack Hill as a horror film featuring Campbell's murderous painter and comic relief scenes with a group of beatnik artists, and then was further revised by Rothman, who added the vampire sequences.  That the film is coherent at all considering that history is something remarkable.  Unfortunately, as Campbell was unavailable for the final reshoots, a different actor who does not resemble him plays the vampire, making for a bit of a jarring contrast.  Regardless, as a whole, it's not a bad film, and it's fun to watch to guess which scenes were filmed when and by whom.