La casa donde habita el diablo

I last saw The House Where Evil Dwells on VHS, unaware that the beginning and the ending had suffered from a total of 34 seconds of cuts, removing the film's bloody decapitations and dismemberment (thanks BBFC!). No wonder I found it so underwhelming. Having just watched the film uncut, I can verify that the gory scenes that bookend the film are easily the highlights, although the sight of Susan George naked and a crab attack are also fairly memorable for different reasons.

The excellent opening scene, set in the middle of the 19th century, sees a samurai returning home to find his wife in the arms of another man. Sword in hand, the wronged warrior bursts into the house and slaughters the lovers, before committing hara-kiri (ritual suicide).

Cut to the present day: American magazine writer Ted Fletcher (Edward Albert), his wife Laura (Susan George, looking as lovely as always) and their daughter Amy (Amy Barrett) arrive in Japan, where friend Alex Curtis (Doug McClure) has arranged a house for them to live in while Ted writes an article. No prizes for guessing that it's the same house where the samurai went kill crazy with his katana, that the ghosts of all three dead people still haunt the building, or that history is about to repeat itself.

With superimposed spooks in bad make-up orchestrating Rentaghost-style supernatural occurrences, much of The House Where Evil Dwells is unmitigated cheeze, moderately entertaining for its sheer silliness. Director Kevin Connor gave us the excellent Amicus anthology From Beyond the Grave (1974) and that classic of the macabre, Motel Hell (1980), but let's not forget that he also gave us those campy craptastic fantasy flicks The Land That Time Forgot , At The Earth's Core, and Warlords of Atlantis (also starring the mighty Doug McClure). The House Where Evil Dwells is more camp than classic.

Household objects move by themselves, the ghosts possess the living to make them behave uncharacteristically, Laura sleeps with Alex (giving George another opportunity to shed her clothes), Amy is attacked by crabs, including two oversized clockwork crustaceans that can climb trees, and Ted witnesses an incident involving a samurai sword that would have had me saying 'Sayonara' and hopping on the next bullet train outta there.

Connor wraps thing up as expected, with Laura telling Ted about her infidelity, which leads to a wonderfully daft finale in which Albert and McClure do bad martial arts, before Ted lops off his old friend's noggin, stabs Laura with his sword, and kills himself.

This could have been interesting – a Japan-set haunted house story from the viewpoint of a newly-installed American family – but falls flat due to an over-simplified treatment and the unsuitability of both cast and director.

The film suffers from the same problem I often encounter with the popular modern renaissance of such native fare, i.e. the fact that the spirits demonstrate themselves to be evil for no real reason other than that they're expected to! Besides, it doesn't deliver much in the scares department – a giant crab attack is merely silly – as, generally, the ghosts inhabit a specific character and cause him or her to act in a totally uncharacteristic way, such as Susan George seducing diplomat/friend-of-the-family Doug McClure and Edward Albert force-feeding his daughter a bowl of soup!

At one point, an old monk turns up at the house to warn Albert of the danger if they remain there – eventually, he's called upon to exorcise the premises. However, history is bound to repeat itself and tragedy is the only outcome of the tense situation duly created – leading to a violent yet unintentionally funny climax in which Albert and McClure, possessed by the spirits of their Japanese predecessors, engage in an impromptu karate duel to the death! At the end of the day, this emerges an innocuous time-waster – tolerable at just 88 minutes but, in no way, essential viewing.

This generally above-average horror entry is rather familiar plot-wise and, near the end, devolves - after a silly "exorcism" sequence - into a martial-arts actioner! But it offers some intriguing ideas, some creepy sound effects, a graphically bloody, and gripping, opening sequence and a surprisingly grim conclusion. It could've used a more talented leading man, though. (**)

From reading all of the comments posted here on IMDb, this movie seems to get ragged on a lot, but I didn't think it was THAT bad. I've seen much worse, actually.

"The House Where Evil Dwells" is a ghost story about a husband and his wife, Ted and Laura Fletcher, and their daughter, Amy, who move into an old house in Japan. Little do they know, a Japanese ninja brutally murdered his wife and her lover, and then killed himself 100 years earlier with a samurai sword. As strange things happen in the house, the ghosts of the previous residents begin to possess the bodies of the living, and plan on re-enacting the bloody murder that took place 100 years back.

I saw this movie and decided to give it a chance, from the cover it looked like a decent ghost story. It was routine, and it was corny, but I've seen worse in my day. The ghost sequences were a little over-done, we get to see the translucent blue-tinted figures randomly pop up randomly around the family, and take over their bodies. To be honest, the ghosts in this movie kind of reminded me of the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. I may be mistaken, but after watching this, it seemed to me that the Japanese horror film "Ju-On: The Grudge" and the American remake of that film ripped this off a little. The old Japanese home where a brutal murder took place, ghostly activity, curses put on the home, etc. But I may be wrong.

To sum it up, this is a pretty corny ghost story. Don't go out of your way to see it, but if you like this kind of thing and it happens to come on TV you can give it a shot. 4/10.

Chock full of 70's B-television staples, House Where Evil Dwells is the perfect movie to watch while getting drunk with a bunch of friends. It's hard to beat ghosts who must open and close doors to get in and out of the house they're haunting (silly Susan George opens the door after a monk exorcises the house and lets them all back in!) and giant attacking crabs muttering in Japanese. And not to be missed is the last scene in which out-of-shape Doug McClure is possessed by the ghost of a Samurai and awkwardly kicks and chops at MOW stud Edward Albert (oh, Trampas!) High camp that is sure to please.