If Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films were like sipping fine wine from a dusty goblet in a haunted castle, then Dungeons of Horror is the moldy grape stomped on by a drunk uncle in the basement of a rundown Chili’s. Directed, edited, co-written, scored, and possibly exorcised by San Antonio anchorman-turned-comic-book artist Pat Boyette, this 1964 Gothic catastrophe is what happens when ambition far outpaces ability—and common sense goes missing in the fog.
Here is a film that aspires to The Pit and the Pendulum and lands somewhere closer to The Gutter and the Gardening Shears.
Castles Made of Cardboard
The plot, in the loosest sense of the word, involves one Aaron Fallon, the last of his noble line and possibly also the last man to ever deliver dialogue like he’s reading it off the back of a cereal box. After a shipwreck—which the film simulates by throwing a bucket of water at a model schooner and yelling “Action!”—Fallon and a surviving captain wash up on a mysterious island, only to stumble into a castle so decrepit it makes Scooby-Doo backgrounds look like Versailles.
Inside this asylum of amateur acting is Count Lorente de Sade—because why not name your villain after the Marquis de Sade if your idea of horror is vague European sadism sprinkled with Scooby-Doo-level menace. The Count keeps a leprous wife in a dungeon, talks to a ghost (portrayed by a San Antonio horror host in what looks like a bedsheet stolen from a laundromat), and owns a menagerie of “horrid animals” which, thanks to budget constraints, remain entirely offscreen or are maybe just raccoons.
There’s also a mute whipping girl, a creepy manservant named Mantis (who I assume got that name for moving as slowly as the editing), and a tragic backstory so convoluted even the castle seems bored of it.
Dialogue So Stiff It Requires a Chisel
Watching Dungeons of Horror is like being trapped in a community theater production of Dark Shadows where the cast didn’t learn their lines and the prompter died of embarrassment halfway through act one. The dialogue is both hilariously overwrought and mumbled through gritted teeth as if everyone involved is being blackmailed.
Take, for instance, Aaron Fallon’s romantic overtures to Cassandra, the nurse who looks perpetually on the verge of calling her agent. It’s hard to feel any chemistry when one person talks like they’re quoting 19th-century greeting cards and the other responds like she’s mentally calculating how many more pages of script are left.
The Editing: Or, How to Stretch a Short Film Into an Eternity
Boyette, who reportedly had to pad the runtime to hit the sacred 90-minute mark, solves the problem the only way a true indie filmmaker could: by not editing at all. Scenes linger well past their expiration date, with characters walking across rooms in real time as if the act of sitting down might trigger a jump scare. (Spoiler: it doesn’t.) It’s less a film and more a slow-motion hostage situation.
The narration, when it arrives, sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet and delivered by someone doing their best “dollar store Vincent Price” impression. It helps nothing and clarifies less.
Public Domain Music and the Ghost of Production Value
The score is cobbled together from public domain scraps, meaning we go from soaring violins to what sounds like rejected Looney Tunes stingers, sometimes in the same scene. The sound design is, to be charitable, haunted. People speak and then—several seconds later—the sound arrives. In one particularly tense scene, the ominous music swells… and then abruptly stops, as though the ghost of Franz Liszt got tired of this nonsense and went home.
Visually, the film aims for Gothic grandeur but ends up looking like it was filmed in the guest wing of a condemned Olive Garden. The lighting is so murky you’ll wonder if the titular “dungeon” is just the filmmaker’s garage with a fog machine and regret.
A Dangerous Game of “Who Can Act Less?”
Eventually, the Count decides to hunt Fallon and Cassandra in a twisted game reminiscent of The Most Dangerous Game, but with all the danger of a gentle hike through a backyard haunted hayride. The climax involves torchlight, bad screams, and what may or may not be a slow-motion chase down a hallway padded with packing peanuts.
And just when you think the film might surprise you, it doesn’t. It ends. Kind of. Maybe. I think someone got out alive. Or maybe the editor just ran out of film and Boyette shouted “wrap!”
Final Thoughts: Not Quite So Bad It’s Good—But Definitely So Bad It’s Weird
There’s a kind of endearing lunacy to Dungeons of Horror. You can feel the fingerprints of every corner that was cut and every dollar that wasn’t spent. It’s a film stitched together by the sheer willpower of a man who probably thought, “How hard could Gothic horror really be?” The answer, dear reader, is very.
It’s a fascinating artifact of regional indie cinema, a time capsule of cardboard sets, warbly audio, and high ambition sunk by low execution. But even in its worst moments—and there are many—it somehow avoids being completely unwatchable. Maybe it’s the sincerity. Maybe it’s the charm of watching a movie that feels like it was made by your high school AV club after one too many Edgar Allan Poe readings. Or maybe it’s just morbid curiosity.
Either way, Dungeons of Horror is a must-miss for anyone expecting terror, and a must-see for connoisseurs of trainwreck cinema.
★ out of ★★★★ — It’s Gothic. It’s horror. But mostly, it’s a dungeon of poor decisions.
