The House of Fear

An actor, John Woodford, dies on-stage during a performance of a play. His body is taken to his dressing room, where it disappears. The theatre is closed for over a year, and rumors that Woodford's ghost haunts it spread all over Broadway.

A detective (posing as a producer) rents the theatre and attempts to present the same play, but all sorts of "ghostly occurences" happen to try to thwart his plans. (Woodford's voice coming over a dead telephone, his face appearing on the pitch-dark stage during a police vigil, more murders, mysterious notes from the "dead man", etc).

All-in-all, a "different" mystery with good acting; if you watch the film intently, you can figure out who the murderer is (but, it's DIFFICULT!). Highly recommended. (btw....this film has NOTHING to do with the Sherlock Holmes film of the same name).

Theatre actor John Woodford (Donald Douglas) dies suddenly while on stage, and his body mysteriously goes missing shortly thereafter. The actor's ghost is rumoured to haunt the theatre, and the place closes down.

To try and solve the mystery, police detective McHugh (William Gargan) poses as a producer who wants to reopen the theatre, putting on Woodford's last play, 'Dangerous Currents', with the same cast members.

Mysterious notes, purportedly written by Woodford, warn the cast not to go ahead with the play, and leading man Carleton (Walter Woolf King) is found dead. The play goes ahead, however, McHugh determined to catch the killer.

A creaky whodunit with plenty of suspects, The House of Fear is like a live-action Scooby Doo episode, with the detective discovering clues along the way that help him to solve the crime. And like a Scooby Doo episode, any seemingly supernatural occurrences are explained away, with the villain chased, caught and unmasked in the final act, an outpouring of convoluted exposition explaining their motive and modus operandi.

It's all a bit too talky to be wholly entertaining, but at just over an hour, the pace is fairly brisk and there are some fun performances (Dorothy Arnold is great as gold-digger actress Gloria DeVere), although the obligatory comic relief -- El Brendel as stagehand Jeff -- is thoroughly irritating.

After an actor is killed during the middle of a play the theatre is closed. A year later a young producer (who happens to be a detective going undercover to find out what happened to the dead actor whose body disappeared ) re-assembles the cast and re-opens the theatre (the theater is now reported to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered actor), intending to the stage the same play performed on the night of the murder.

He has a hunch that the killer will show his hand. He does just that as yet another actor is murdered by mysterious means.

Threatening letters, suddenly darkness, secret passages, a motley group of suspects, and murder - this is a fun mystery film featuring an energetic cast, enough things happening to keep you entertained, and the actual theatre is beautifully shot; there's a nice reveal of the murderer at the end. The dialogue is quite witty.

Bearing no relation to the Sherlock Holmes 1945 outing of the same title, and actually being a little mistitled itself (shouldn't it be "Theater of Fear"?), "House of Fear" (1939) is a minor if well-plotted whodunit, a remake of a 1928 silent film called "Last Warning" (which I have not seen). It begins well, with a murder (?) during a radio show that turns out to be part of a stage play (the radio show, not the murder), it stalls midway through as it seems no progress in the investigation is being made, but there are some good stunts at the end, and an amusing turn by the little-known Dorothy Arnold as the "easiest study in town" (wink, wink). **1/2 out of 4.

House of Fear, The (1939)

** (out of 4)

Lazy, routine and by the numbers remake of The Last Warning from Universal. The story is pretty much the same as an actor gets murdered during a performance and then years later the cast is brought back together to try and trap the killer. This certainly sinks to the "C" level in Universal's library and it comes off very lazy compared to the original film. Several scenes are redone here but they don't come off nearly as good as the original film. The cast is also rather boring and bland but the 67-minute running time does go by fast.