Haunting Fear (1991)

Director:

Fred Olen Ray

Writers:

Edgar Allan Poe (story)
Fred Olen Ray (writer)

Release Date:

March 1991 (USA)

Genre:

Horror | Drama

Plot:

A woman has nightmares of being buried alive which somehow awakens a long-repressed enity inside her while her greedy, cheating husband plots to murder her for her money.

Plot Keywords:

Hypnosis | Dream | Nightmare | Brinke Stevens Barefoot | Barefoot

Cast

Brinke Stevens	...	Victoria Munroe
Jan-Michael Vincent	...	Detective James Trent
Jay Richardson	...	Terry Munroe
Delia Sheppard	...	Lisa
Karen Black	...	Dr. Julia Harcourt
Robert Clarke	...	Dr. Carlton
Robert Quarry	...	Visconti
Michael Berryman	...	Mortician
Hoke Howell	...	Father Corpse
Greta Carlson	...	Visconti's Girl (as Sherri Graham)
Mark Thomas McGee	...	Morgue Attendant #1
Jeff Yesko	...	Morgue Attendant #2

Runtime:

88 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:R | UK:18 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

American Independent Productions

Trivia:

Brinke Stevens wrote a screen play called "Buried Nightmares" that was to be a sequel to Haunting Fear, but the movie was never produced.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: Obvious fake head when Victoria knifes Terry and decapitates him.

Movie Connections:

Featured in 100 Years of Horror: Scream Queens (1996) (V)

Ha! You were actually expecting Poe?

First off...with names like Fred Olen Ray, Brinke Stevens and Jan-Michael Vincent, plus distributors like "Rhino" and "Troma" on the video box, you know what you're getting into with this one. B movie mania! If you're actually expecting to see a thriller "based on Edgar Allan Poe," then forget it and head straight for the excellent series of Roger Corman 60s Poe films. This is pure, unadulterated sleaze (with just a pedestrian attempt at a plot similar to "The Premature Burial"), complete with lots of R-rated, ready-for-video sex and nudity. However, it's certainly entertaining and fun in a slipshod kind of way...

Brinke (who has three nude scenes in the first 30 minutes) plays rich, traumatized, insomniac housewife Victoria Monroe, whose fear of being prematurely entombed stems from her belief that the same fate befell her father (Hoke Howell). Her worthless husband Terry (Jay Richardson) has racked up some serious gambling debt (owed to a gangster played by Robert Quarry) and, with help from his kinky, blonde, European-accented sexpot secretary Lisa (Delia Sheppard) plots to do away with Brinke for her money. Name-value actress Karen Black drops in briefly wearing a blonde wig as a hypnotist (she's way too talented to be playing an insignificant role like this), 50s sci-fi/horror star Robert Clarke plays a doctor and family friend and Michael Berryman shows up for a decent nightmare sequence performing an autopsy on a still-living Vicki. Jan-Michael Vincent mostly sits outside a house in his car making goo-goo eyes as Brinke enters and exits the home.

The kill-a-spouse-for-the-inheritance plot has been done a million times before, the ending is an unintentional laugh riot (concluding with a direct rip-off of the Zuni Fetish Doll segment in TRILOGY OF TERROR) and whoever created the awful stabbed face and decapitated head FX for this release needs to sharpen up on their skills a bit. Brinke does a decent job making her character somewhat sympathetic, but the biggest surprise of all is how good former Penthouse Pet Delia Sheppard is in her role. She stole every scene she was in and easily gave the standout performance here.