La casa de la muerte negra

Jerry Warren, Harold Daniels and (if we can believe the credits) Reginald LeBorg all had something to do with putting this movie together. Jerry is famous for importing Mexican movies, adding new scenes and releasing them as "new". CREATURE OF THE WALKING DEAD and CURSE OF THE STONE HAND come quickly to mind. He also directed MAN BEAST and introduced to world to "Rock Madison" an actor who never really existed! Harold Daniels directed the original version of BAYOU (1956) which was spiced up with "Adults Only" footage a few years later and re-released as POOR WHITE TRASH. Reginald LeBorg had worked with stars Lon Chaney and John Carradine previously in things like DEAD MAN'S EYES, THE MUMMY'S GHOST and THE BLACK SLEEP. The combination of these three culminates with a movie that is . . . well . . .unusual to say the least.

The small town of Wydeburn (it seems to only have 20 residents) is controlled by the feuding DeSade family. The good warlock Andre (John Carradine) controls half the citizens and bad warlock Belial (Lon Chaney) rules the others. Andre tells us that Belial has a cloven hoof but we never see it. Chaney's limp is no doubt due to an attack of gout which he was plagued with for the last years of his life. He does sport a nice pair of horns though. Another member of the family is supposed to be a werewolf and to be fair we do get a brief insert shot of the man wearing what is meant (I guess) to be a werewolf mask! Another DeSade brother (Tom Drake, who costarred with Chaney in THE CYCLOPS back in 1957) comes home with a doctor colleague (Andrea King, best remembered from THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS) to save his sister (Delores Faith) from what he believes is the family madness. Without spoiling too much of the plot (actually the directors did that themselves!) he soon learns that not all of Life's mysteries can be explained away in medical books!

Continuity is barely there and scenes jump around so much you have to wonder who did the editing. At one moment Carradine declares he is tired and must rest yet in the very next scene he is in the living room talking about the family history! Watch how Delores Faith is wearing high heels when she leaves Carradine's house but is barefoot when she arrives at Chaney's place. Everyone I this picture had experience with the genre and I can only assume they did the best they could with a budget that from probably non existent from Day One and three directors all going in different directions. Katherine Victor from THE CAPE CANAVERAL MONSTERS shows up long enough to initiate a new member into Belial's coven. One name "Adults Only" star Sabrina (qv THE ICE HOUSE)shows up as a harem dancer.

If you think Roger Corman's THE TERROR (1963) is all over the map plotwise sit down and try to watch this movie! It's too incoherent to even to be funny. Oh well, call me a completist but I'll watch anything with Lon and John in it. Nice try, guys.

Filmed in Sept 1965, "Night of the Beast" was the debut feature for novice producer William White, better known to horror fans as actor Bill Hampton, from 1959's "The Hideous Sun Demon" and 1965's "The Human Duplicators," while director Harold Daniels scored a success with the 1958 "Terror in the Haunted House" aka "My World Dies Screaming." The exceedingly small budget must have run out as completion neared, and the filmmakers lost control of the footage, soon picked up by schlockmeister Jerry Warren, whose additional 11 minutes of added scenes extended the running time to 74 minutes, but otherwise served little purpose due to his inept editing. A black and white movie that could only get playdates on the bottom half of double bills under the title "Blood of the Man Devil" (or even all night drive-in creature features), what is now better known as "House of the Black Death" languishes in obscurity to this day, little seen even on television despite the presence of genre heavyweights Lon Chaney and John Carradine (alas, not once sharing any scenes together). Sibling warlocks in service to their master Satan, Carradine's Andre Desard represents the wealthy upper class, while Chaney's Belial Desard heads up the plebeian tier, leading the tiny town of Widderburn to revolt against Andre and usurp his all powerful status with their lord and master (the book from which the excessively wordy script was adapted was titled "The Widderburn Horror"). Displaying the goat's horns that make him an even greater emissary of the Devil, the top billed Chaney gets more footage than his co-star, threatening the souls of Andre's son Paul (Tom Drake), cursed by lycanthropy, and daughter Valerie (Dolores Faith), whom Belial seems to covet for himself. Virtually everyone is defeated by the ill conceived screenplay, but even under these impoverished circumstances both Chaney and (especially) Carradine are remarkably professional. Jerry Warren never shied away from taking credit for the film's belated release, but as editor he blunders badly on several occasions: we see doctors Mallory (Andrea King) and Campion (Jerome Thor) accompanied by villager Stokes (Sherwood Keith) BEFORE Belial assigns him as their guide, while Carradine's Andre claims he must rest, but is being chastised by Valerie in the very next scene for revealing the family secrets to Campion. The most egregious error was in showing us Chaney's goat horns well before his supposed 'big reveal' in front of a shocked doctor Mallory! Gorgeous blonde bombshell Sabrina, known as 'Britain's Jayne Mansfield,' provides plentiful eye candy dancing for Chaney's delighted amusement, but otherwise serves no purpose and has no dialogue. Warren's new scenes feature a brunette dancer of lesser merit, and regular stock company performers Katherine Victor and George Andre attempting to plug a few gaps in continuity, their repeated chants only adding to the numbing sense of boredom. Still, it just might qualify as the best film that Jerry Warren was ever involved in! (Carradine and Victor would rejoin him for his 1981 comeback feature "Frankenstein Island").

Unfortunately I can't comment on the movie as I have never seen it, but I just thought I'd let people know that yes, it is based on a book! The book is the Widderburn Horror and from what I've been reading here, it's considerably better than this movie.

I had always felt that it would make a good movie so I did a search on it and ended up here only to be sadly disappointed. If someone would do it properly, I still think it would make a fine movie. The book has it all, witchcraft, devil worship, werewolves - actual transformation into a wolf, not some horror film monster, and a family of witches going back centuries that could be the inspiration for Anne Rice's witches in the Witching Hour. Not to mention a story of unrequited love.

Considering how old the novel is, there is no indication of the time period and it could still work very well if it were set in the present day. If anyone is interested, you can find the book on amazon, used of course. It's the Widderburn Horror by R.Warner-Crozetti aka Lora Crozetti. As far as I can tell, it's the only book she ever wrote and it seems that it was meant to be the first of a series but never went any further.

Considering all the remakes being produced today that are pointless and inferior to the original, this is one book that cries out for someone to do it properly.

Relatives returning to their ancestral home tangle with warlocks and a family curse.

If this was based on an actual novel, as the credits claim, it has to be filmdom's sorriest screen adaptation. (Then again, the book angle could have been fabricated by crudmeister Jerry Warren, whose cinematic transgressions include bogus credits.) Like MONSTER A GO GO ('65), this plays like an unfinished film. You pity old hands Tom Drake and Andrea King, clueless that they'll "star" in what amounts to a series of barely connected scenes.

On the other hand, Lon Chaney and John Carradine probably knew exactly what type of muck they were standing in. Carradine hams his role of family patriarch so badly, Hormel could sue for product defamation. Chaney, possibly hired because the plot includes a werewolf, plays a horned satanist who limps with an (unseen) cloven hoof...or did he just drop a hooch bottle on his foot? Familiar TV face Jerome Thor is screendom's most pitiful lycanthrope, though he gives it what I guess is his best shot.

Master film mangler Jerry Warren attempted to finish the film by randomly inserting new scenes that add nothing but running time. Sparse music cues contribute to the lethargy.

House of the Black Death (1965)

* (out of 4)

Two warlocks, one good (John Carradine) and one evil (Lon Chaney, Jr.) battle over human souls. I really don't have the faintest idea what this film is about because there are three story lines going on and none of them make any sense on their own so mixing them together is even more confusing. One of the stories deals with the warlock's other brother who's a werewolf but we never actually see the wolf. Again, here's a film that you hang onto because you're expecting something to happen but nothing ever does happen so in the end you've just wasted your time. To make matters even worse Chaney and Carradine don't share any scenes together.