Hazel Court, an ingenue who appeared opposite my beloved Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in a number of horror films of the 50s and 60s, many directed by Roger Corman, has died. I’ve only seen two of her films––she was exceedingly creepy opposite Ray Milland in The Premature Burial (trailer here) but falls back in my memory to Jane Asher’s anachronistically bewigged peasant girl in Corman’s epic The Masque of the Red Death––but I should really try to get my hands on Devil Girl From Mars, excerpted above with a soundtrack adjustment courtesy of YouTube user Zuebee. Behold Zuebee’s review, from the YouTube synopsis:

This has got to be one of the worst movies ever made (apologies to Ed Wood). Beware any movie based on a play as all they seem to do is talk their way through scenes as if they were still on the stage. The plot involves the characters constantly drinking, talking and drinking some more (well, it does take place in a Scottish pub) and then occasionally stepping outside to gawk at the spaceship. The female Martian is dressed like a cross between Darth Vader and a dominatrix and is always taunting the inferior Earthlings. The robot (”Watch the power of another world”) looks like it was made from a large refrigerator cardboard box but I do like the way it shoots a death ray out of its head!

Hazel Court was 82. For a slightly higher-brow sampling of Court’s work, you can watch all of Corman’s ambitious surprisingly not-that-laughable period piece Masque of the Red Death in installments on YouTube.