House of the Damned
Director: Maury Dexter
Year: 1963
Rating: 5.0
This film has a slow creepy build-up for 58 of
its 62-minute running time, but then quickly deflates like a popped balloon
for the final few minutes leaving the audience thinking, what the hell. There
was so much potential for a really scary Gothic horror but apparently the
director Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, The Mini-Skirt Mob, Helles
Belles) or producers just shied away from going there. The best character
in the film is the house. It is a home that has been used in many films named
Greystone Mansions and Dexter uses angles shooting it that make it feel malign.
If you look at pictures of the entire estate, it feels very different. No
idea if the interior scenes are of the Mansion, but if so, it is magnificently
ornate and a perfect setting for horror. If only there had been more horror.
The female owner of a large castle like
home is in an insane asylum and the renter for nine years has gone missing.
A lawyer asks his architecture friend Scott (Ron Foster) and his wife Nancy
(Merry Anders) to go stay there and come up with some ideas on how to fix
it up. Just the long driveway and the jumbled styles mashed together would
have sent me running. But they get in and begin to explore this huge house
- with two doors that won't open. It becomes clear that they are not alone.
The lawyer friend and his wife come up as well and she disappears. After
seeing Jaws hanging in a closet. Jaws being Richard Kiel.
Creepier things are in hiding. And then
puff. The air is let out and everyone goes home. I have a bit of a thing
for Merry Anders and it is the reason why I watched the film. She never made
it above B films - The Dalton Girls, Belle Star in Young Jesse James - but
it was her appearances in Dragnet as the female cop that Joe Friday passed
on that brought her to my attention. Come on Joe. I know you like your bachelor
life but she practically threw herself at you.
