When Boris Karloff was dying of emphysema, he made four movies in three weeks. They were all written by Roger Corman's protégé Jack Hill, produced in Mexico for almost nothing, and subsequently lost in the abyss of pirated VHS tapes. Elite Entertainment has finally resurrected one of these films from its tomb, and while I wouldn't have paid for Fear Chamber, (Cámara del Terror), I'm glad it didn't stay lost.

Dr. Carl Mantel (Karloff) believes that life exists in the center of the Earth. So he sends his daughter Corinne (Julissa) and fellow scientist Mark (Carlos East) to investigate. They discover a rock that can communicate. It sends messages to the lab's computers, and the scientists pour over reams of paper trying to figure out what they mean. But the rock only communicates if you feed it. And it needs a certain chemical to survive--one only produced by humans when they're terrified.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't do much to help the audience figure out what's going on. We see Corinne in her protective suit, surrounded by molten rock; then the film cuts to a woman undressing in a room. After switching off a lamp with a fetus in it and going to sleep, she wakes up in an underground chamber full of skeletons and snakes. (How do the scientists learn that the rock feeds off fear? Beats me).

Fear Chamber feels like two separate movies--one where scientists talk to each other in acid trip-inspired labs, and one where women are tortured in a catacomb--because it is. Jack Hill shot Karloff's lab scenes in Hollywood, and Juan Ibáñez shot most of the torture sequences in Mexico. While this shooting schedule was best for Karloff, who was too sick to travel, it ultimately harmed the film. We go from the lab to the fear chamber and back again, but, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote, "[N]ever the twain shall meet."

Although the film's main problem is the scratchy seams in its narrative, there are plenty of other flaws familiar to anyone who's watched a bad low-budget movie. Special effects are cheap (the fear-sucking monster looks like rock concert lighting), and every actor but Karloff has been dubbed over. Even the actresses' make up is badly overdone.

I may not have liked Fear Chamber, but I loved what Elite did with it. This movie will never look or sound better than it does on this DVD. The 5.1 Surround track is fuzzless, and even Jack Hill was impressed with how clear the image was. He said so several times on his commentary track, which I enjoyed much more than the film. He says that he tried to write all of Karloff's scenes so that he could sit down or lie in bed, and that the lesbian S&M was entirely Ibáñez's doing. Hill even confessed that he's writing a new script around the Fear Chamber story, and I'd like to see what he does. The movie's premise is intriguing--it's everything else that's the problem.

I can't really recommend Fear Chamber to anybody but the most antiquarian Karloff scholars; it really is that bad. But Boris Karloff and Elite do their best to make the movie palatable, and I admire Elite for taking a chance on it.