This was the only episode in the show's entire run where they showed the movie before the short. I assume this was because they wanted to get the damn thing over with and forget about it as quickly as possible. I sympathize.
Ring of Terror begins with a graveyard custodian, who looks rather like a corpse himself, calling to his cat Puma as if he intends to molest it. He happens across a gravestone belonging to a Lewis Moffitt, who supposedly died at twenty-two – we then flash back to meet this 'young' man, a dedicated medical student who claims not to be afraid of anything. Blood doesn't shake him, and rattlesnakes merely piss him off. His one terrible, secret fear? Zombies.
For a fraternity hazing, Moffitt is dared to steal a ring from a corpse. When he tries to do so, he is startled by Puma the cat, thinks the corpse is coming to life, and dies of a heart attack on the spot. I think we're meant to assume that the fraternity brothers were deeply sorry and promised never to haze anybody ever again, but there's no denoument. We just cut back to the graveyard custodian, and the movie ends.
A good indication of the general level of creativity on display here is that the screenwriter, Lewis Simeon, and the main character, Lewis Moffitt, have the same first name. He named the main character after himself. Bert I. Gordon at least named Glenn Manning after the actor who played him.
Let's begin by dealing with some of the most obvious badness in the movie. As Joel and the bots observe, repeatedly, almost all the actors are way older than the characters they're supposed to be playing. It's hard to tell the difference between the students and the professors. George E. Mather was forty-two when he played twenty-two-year-old Lewis Moffitt. That's gotta be some kind of a record. Esther Furst, playing Moffitt's girlfriend Betty, can't be that much younger, but I’m not gonna complain too much about that. I mean, how creepy would it be to have an actual twenty-two-year-old playing opposite Mather? Apparently this was something that figured prominently in the original reviews, too – when people think your actors are too old in a business that's used to overage movie college students, you know you screwed up.
The acting is distractingly bad, stilted and recited. Everybody looks bored – in a scene at the snappily-named Campus Cafeteria Club, the dancers look bored, the diners look bored, the band looks bored. Even the skeleton in the dissection theater (hanging out in between shoots for Teenagers from Outer Space) looks bored! The only characters in the whole movie who honestly seem to be having a good time are Tiny and Ragdoll, who are there to be the butts of a series of fat jokes. It's not funny the first time, and it gets less and less funny as the movie progresses.
Actually, Tiny and Ragdoll probably show more character – in the sense of both personality and fortitude – than the rest of the cast put together. Tiny refuses to starve himself to gain the fraternity's approval. He'd rather hang out with people who accept him for who he is. He feels ill and momentarily passes out at the autopsy, but does not leave the room. He thinks Ragdoll is the most beautiful girl at the school, inside and out, and does not qualify it with references to her weight. Ragdoll herself enters a beauty contest, apparently not a bit bothered by the possibility of ridicule. They appear to be a committed, happy pair who honestly adore one another, and they're the only couple in the movie with any chemistry or anything in common. Just let them eat their ice cream and be in love! You wish you had that kind of confidence!
The bad actors get no help at all from the terrible script. Simeon barely even attempts to give anybody a personality, and everything that happens feels contrived, as if the entire movie is serving a plot purpose rather than showing us natural events. We are more told what people are like than we are shown. Characters inform us that Betty is intelligent and devoted, but we don't really see any evidence of either. Betty says she feels like there are two sides to Moffitt, always battling for control, but he seems like one person, one bland and boring person, to us. We are told that Moffitt brags and swaggers because he's proudly not afraid of anything, and that this behaviour upsets Betty, but we never see it. Actually, since she uses the phrase 'they say', perhaps this is rumour with no truth to it, but we don't see anybody else talk about it, or any other effect it has on Moffitt or his reputation. We hear that Wayne Arnold, the boy who died in a car accident halfway through the film, was a daredevil and close to the others, but we never met him – or if we did, nobody ever called him by name.
The movie is also a study in padding. The framing story, with the custodian and the cat, exists merely to make the movie longer (and to emphasize that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Moffitt is twenty-two years old). All the 'comic relief' with Tiny and Ragdoll is padding. Moffitt wanders around the mausoleum for far longer than necessary, also padding.
Then there's Moffitt's scare, which is supposed to be the whole point of the film. In a previous scene, he let a friend in on his one fear: as a child, Moffitt had to sleep in the same house where his grandfather's corpse was waiting to be buried, and his mother told him that if he didn't stop complaining and go to bed, the body would get up and 'give him a licking'. He's had nightmares about it ever since, and sleeps with the light on. And yes, that's scary – but I'm not sure what it is about this particular situation that reminds him of the incident.
At the funeral home, with Arnold's corpse laid out in a coffin and comfortable surroundings, the lights go out and Moffitt immediately panics as he remembers his chidhood scare. That makes sense. But in the clinical environment of the autopsy room he shows no fear of the John Doe corpse whatsoever. When he finds it later in the mausoleum, it's stored away in a drawer and the environment doesn't appear to be particularly dark. It's clearly not as dark as it was in the funeral home, and Moffitt has no trouble reading the signs and lables. The setting is completely different. The music suggests that the ring is somehow important in Moffitt's mind, but we don't get an explanation for this. Was his grandfather buried with a similar one?
Why is Moffitt given such a dangerous and illegal fraternity assignment at all? The other characters' hazings are harmless. One guy gets doused with Coca-Cola, another has to dress up as Cupid and surprise couples making out, a third has to go begging for pennies, and Tiny is merely asked to lose some weight. Yet Moffitt is told to break into a place, desecrate a corpse, and steal a piece of jewelry? What sense does that make?
Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the movie makes no attempt to scare the audience. Rather than trying to put us in Moffitt's shoes, where we might experience the heart-stopping terror along with him, it presents its story in a dry, textbookish way that lacks interest or mystery. From the very beginning we are told how it ends, with the shot of Moffitt's headstone, and it continues to be dull and predictable from there. Nothing in the script is even surprising, let alone scary, which comes across as an absolute ripoff in a movie with such an evocative title.
Now, let's talk about how this movie depicts women. I honestly wonder if Lewis Simeon ever met a woman. He clearly had no idea what they do when there are no men around. Maybe he thinks women are quantum waveforms who only collapse into actual people when they are observing or being observed by men. None of the female characters in the movie appear to have lives of their own. When we see them, they're talking about their boyfriends. Or going to the Cafeteria with their boyfriends. Or visiting the beauty parlour to look nice for their boyfriends. Or entering beauty contests for the approval of their boyfriends. Are they even at school here, or are they just hanging around so that the boys can get laid? None of them appear to study or even attend classes.
Oh, silly me, they're all taking Home Economics! They don't have to study when cooking and sewing come so naturally to women!
The women are also notable for their peevish selfishness. They collectively give the boys the cold shoulder for 'abandoning' them at a dance in favour of attending an autopsy. As Moffitt points out, though, they must have known that attending the autopsy was necessary for obtaining full course credits. Perhaps if the women have no lives outside of the men, they assume the men should not have lives outside of them? Betty is an exception to this, as she's annoyed with Moffitt over the rumors of his bragging rather than because he stood her up, but as I noted above, that doesn’t make sense either. I'm kind of astonished that we never get a reference to the idea that they're all just dating medical students in the hopes of being wealthy doctors' wives someday.
At the end of this movie, Joel asks the bots if they can name something good about it. Nobody can, but I think I've got one: despite what Crow says, I'm pretty sure they did use a fake snake for the scene in which Moffitt stomps it to death. The snake in the back of the car was probably an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, but it is never seen in the same shot as any of the actors and I expect they had a professional snake handler to work with it. The snake Moffitt stamps on does not show the rattlesnake's bold markings, so if it wasn't rubber it was at least not the same snake. I hope it was rubber. Killing things just to put it in a movie is inexcusable –I'm looking at you, Ruggero Deodato.
