House of the Damned

Ron Foster ("Private Lessons") and Merry Anders ("Women of the Prehistoric Planet") play Scott and Nancy Campbell, a married couple hired by their friend, a lawyer named Joe Schiller (Richard Crane, "The Alligator People"), to do an architectural survey on a country estate. Soon after they arrive, they experience some strange, moderately disconcerting experiences. Knowing full well that the old crone (Georgia Schmidt) who owned the place (who's now confined to an institution) would have loathed police interference, they attempt to do their own sleuthing.

This fairly lightweight, routine "old dark house" type horror film ultimately doesn't deliver much in the way of actual horror. It's certainly well made, with some excellent black & white cinematography and camera work. (The Cinema Scope aspect ratio of 2.35:1 does help a lot.) The performances are all quite engaging and the script by Harry Spalding ("Chosen Survivors") features some mildly amusing lines. The "castle" itself is an appropriate setting, adding to the atmosphere that producer & director Maury Dexter ("The Mini-Skirt Mob", "Hell's Belles") is able to create.

Foster and Anders make for a personable main couple, with fine support from Crane, Erika Peters ("The Atomic Brain", "Mr. Sardonicus") and the prolific Dal McKennon ('Daniel Boone', "Lady and the Tramp"). A very young Richard Kiel ("Eegah", "The Spy Who Loved Me") makes an appearance as a mute giant.

"House of the Damned" is watchable enough, but it never does live up to that title.

Six out of 10.

Not too bad. With a running time of 64 minutes I was expecting a cheap thriller and it has a lot of setup. When things start to get weird the movie gets a little better but you know the closer and closer the end gets you will find out what's going on and then the movie will Immediately end! Kind of unsatisfactory. Some good creepy use of shadow and and the acting was better than I expected. Same thing with the production values.

An obscure and rather uneventful but nevertheless atmospheric and effective little chiller which presents us with a new twist on "the old dark house" theme which may ultimately disappoint some viewers. I won't divulge it here for those who may feel inclined to check this one out: I'll just say that it combines elements from two well-known Tod Browning movies - FREAKS (1932) and MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935) - and leave it at that!

The plot deals with an architect and his wife having to spend the night in the infamous (and supposedly uninhabited) Rochester castle, who are later joined by the former's boss and his sassy girlfriend. However, before long, things start to go bump in the night: a bunch of keys mysteriously disappear and reappear with a couple of them missing, a few doors are inexplicably forbidden to the house dwellers, the girlfriend disappears after a quarrel with her intended, etc. It all seems to point in the direction of the crazed proprietress of the mansion who is currently spending her days in a mental institution but, eventually, we discover that there are even stranger forces at work here...

As I said before, the moody lighting and occasional 'scary' set-pieces are the whole show in this one but, despite the lack of star names, the foursome acquit themselves quite adequately under the circumstances; in the latter stages of the film, Richard "Jaws" Kiel also makes an appearance as an unexpected 'guest' of the Rochester mansion.

The low-priced Fox DVD is accompanied by a theatrical trailer which should not be viewed before the main feature as it virtually shows snippets from all the film's best sequences; interestingly, the much brighter trailer enabled me to make out some details which had eluded me during the film itself!

... with all of the talk of missing keys, key duplicates, and jiggling of locks, but it is probably going to be a bit of a bore for anybody else.

An architect and his wife are staying at a big rambling castle of a house built by the Rochester family. He is hired to do an architectural survey of the house so that the owners can determine if they should remodel, sell, or just demolish it. But then keys start disappearing and reappearing. And when they reappear some keys are missing. And some of the doors to which those keys match are locked from the inside. There are strange figures in the shadows, noises, and things that simply cannot be - like a live severed head - that appear and then disappear.

Then the architect's boss and wife show up, and things start to get soap opera like with the boss and his wife not having the best of marriages. Did I mention that the previous tenant just disappeared? AFTER paying up his rent and leaving everything in the house in good order?

I will give it points for having great creepy atmosphere. The Rochester castle is everything you would ever want in a haunted house. Best scene? A nurse in an insane asylum receives a telephone call to check on a resident and make sure that this person has not escaped. The bored nurse goes to the room, is attacked by this person who seems to be completely out of her mind, they wrestle in hand to hand combat with the insane person trying to strangle the nurse, and then the next scene is the nurse looking completely unfazed and telling the caller "Yeah, she's in her bed in her room". Just another day for this nurse with nerves of steel????

In the sixties, Robert Lippert's Associated Producers scored a contract making black and white 'Scope B movies to run with Fox's big pictures and turned loose house director Maury Dexter on them. The results were uneven but one group - the contemporary thrillers - the Los Angeles films - were more striking than most of the big films that elbowed them out of the advertising space.

Along with WOMAN HUNT, AIR PATROL and the later RAIDERS FROM BENEATH THE SEA, HOUSE OF THE DAMNED spins a thin budget into something surprisingly memorable. It succeeds where the Tod Browning film FREAKS failed in making it's circus performers real rather than monsters. The film's curious gentleness is one of its surprises.

The building of tension is nicely crafted - the unanswered phone, moving shots of the deserted private road, disturbing detail like the broken sculpture, the thirteen keys and the re-appearing sign.

Throw in the winning Merry Anders, anticipating the self reliant seventies woman and the atmospheric Hollywood Hills mansion setting which was once actually a haunt of bootleggers. People I see this with are always surprised that such a film exists.