Fraternity initiation movie flick takes an unexpected turn when, after a couple of goofy pranks in an abandonned house to make scream the girls, six teenagers find themselves locked inside and everything goes proto-slasher. Enters a guy dressed like a Yeti or a sort of caveman who is suspected of the crime until he dies too. "We're not alone!" one of the guys says. The house has no windows, creepy stairs, hidden passages, and a cellar that contains... The THING!!
To compare it to another Fraternity-initiation-goes-terribly-wrong film, this one is pretty cool next to 'Ring Of Terror', made 3 years earlier. 'Ring Of Terror' had some cool shots and sometimes funny acting, but it's still painfully slow and doesn't give much of a payoff at the end that leaves you rather disappointed. I think this is not the case with this movie. After a short dance party, the movie goes right to what we've been waiting for: the old dark house, some mystery, some cadavers, and a couple of twists, maybe easy but rather effective, some masks and monsters, whatever how cheaply done from today's standards. It's a product of its time and in the average drive-in mood of the late 1950s/early 1960s.
What is also interesting is its director, long time actor Richard Crane here in his only directorial effort, symptomatic of the studio system's decay in the 1960s that led actors to try their luck by directing and producing their own movie, like Robert Hutton with 'The Slime People' (1963), or Ray Milland with 'Panic In Year Zero!' (1962). It turned out pretty well for Milland but for others it usually didn't go anywhere and just found them bankrupt.
What serves it badly is the quality of the only available transfer, evidently from a VHS tape and maybe even made out of focus when it was passed from the reels to the tape. This is really a shame because it makes the watching painful when the movie could be enjoyable to aficionados of the genre.
A last thing though, the sound choice of putting repeated never-ending piercing screams in the last scene could add some tension to the scene but it's rather hard to stand in my opinion, nevertheless no doubt some people will enjoy it.
