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.

... 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.

Director Maury Dexter's films are, it seems, generally not much appreciated, but personally I found just about every one, with the exception of Young Guns of Texas, to be thoroughly engaging little support features that were often a cut well above the main attraction. House of the Damned came about mid-way through his early sixties output,and was beautifully lit and photographed in the particularly pleasing combination of black and white with the added benefit of CinemaScope. This is no film for horror fans. It is an atmospheric drama with a sad,low-key ending. Solid cast with popular leading man of the times Ron Foster, and Merry Anders, always a joy to watch, and especially good in Dexter's Police Nurse. House of the Damned rated X for over 16's only, topped the bill at the Rialto Theatre Coventry Street in London's west-end. A limited release in the capital's suburbs saw it supporting another Fox entry Witchcraft. Dexter's output was unpretentious but consistently entertaining, and it would be nice if the Fox Archive people were to release some, if not all of his films in their correct theatrical release ratio. Maury Dexter's contribution to the illustrious history of 20th Century-Fox may be small but it is certainly worthy of recognition.

"House of the Damned" is a quickly made Fox second feature, (inexplicably shot in CinemaScope) which offers the viewer pleasing performances from Ronald Foster, the always fine Merry Anders, and Richard Crane, who apparently is playing fast and loose with his new French bride (Erika Peters) whose acting is - how shall I say? - lousy. These four are exploring an old house with a grim history (what else is new?) which the owners want remodeled. Occasional scares, (supposedly) unexpected events, and undeveloped story reduce this one to a series of build ups to nothing in particular. The photography, however, is above average for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, it's mostly wasted here. Try "House of Dark Shadows", "House of 1000 Dolls", "House of Whipcord" or "House Of Women" instead. Incidentally, the original movie posters announce the film thusly: ''13 Keys Open The Doors To The House Haunted By The Living Dead!' If ever there was a case of fraudulent advertising, this was it. Any appearances by The Living Dead are strictly in the minds of the 20th Century-Fox publicity department.