The modern way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage.
It’s a tidy little superstition vs science horror show. Die, Monster, Die! (1965) is somewhat more sober than its frenetic title. We’re introduced to Stephen Reinhart as he arrives at a small English village in which none of the locals will talk to him or give him directions, once he mentions the Whitley place. This is a little tough on him, as he’s here to ask for the hand of Susan Whitley in marriage, a woman he met and courted in college, where he trained in, ah, science.
The captive audience, don’t you know.
Her father, Nahum, is the lord of the local Whitley manor, and Stephen eventually finds his way to the rundown old estate. Here he finds unhappiness: Mother Letitia won’t leave her bed, but entreats Stephen to take Susan away; father Nahum is confined to a wheelchair and wishes to send Stephen away; servant Merwyn appears to be on his last legs. And where is servant Helga? Is she hiding in the mysteriously glowing greenhouse, locked.
Slowly, all is revealed: that green stone they find buried at the roots of the absurdly large tomato plants is radioactive. Merwyn disappears in a puff of smoke, as it were, while neither Letitia nor Helga meet happy endings. And when Nahum finally faces the truth, that his belief that the stone that fell from the heavens wasn’t the means sent by God to restore the fortunes of the proud Whitley family, but simply a poisonous curse that could have been voided by science, he screws up his own attempt at destroying the stone.
And then his monstrous hunt is on.
Not as horrific as one might wish, and the science is no more than a gesture. But Boris Karloff always brings a certain ambiance to a movie, and the plot is admirably parsimonious with information. It’s a fairly mundane addition to the genre, but kept us mildly, tiredly intrigued from the beginning.
