Subtitles:

None

Extras:

• Commentary by associate producer Gary Kent Moderated by The Alamo Drafthouse's Lars Nilsen

The only feature directorial effort for Paul Harrison, a TV writer on such series as H.R. Pufnstuf and Doctor Dolittle, is a decent low-budget nonsensical atmospheric horror pic. It was atmospherically shot in Salt Lake City, Utah. Harrison co-writes with Thomas J. Kelly a film-within-a film horror story, that slowly builds tension in a haunted house and in the climax the real life scene turns into a poorly executed gory slasher pic.

Harried and demanding veteran horror film director Eric Hartman (John Ireland) films his horror pic on location in the magnificent stately 19th century Beal Mansion, the notorious mansion cursed with seven inexplicable gruesome deaths among the Beal ancestors. The sinister estate caretaker, Edgar Price (John Carradine), warns the cocky director, who moves into the house with the cast during filming, the spirits in the house must not be aroused without putting everyone in danger. The thanks Price gets for his warning is to be kicked off the set.

The director of the movie within the movie likes to slap down the acting takes where nobody blatantly blows it. Sounds like a carbon copy of Paul Harrison, director of The House of Seven Corpses. Granted, it's his first feature, but no wonder he spent the next fifteen years without a directing credit, instead directing silverware layouts. The camera movement is unremarkable, the audio sounds like they connected the boom to a tape recorder using twine, and the actors are given free reign to utterly suck. But that's too film school of an approach for this movie.

I really liked the setup for this movie. Call me a sucker, but I really dig the promise inherent in doomed family stories, a la Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." Yeah, we know that every member of the family since whenever has died in a suspicious way, but the story is in the why and the how of it. But this setup ends up as a bait-and-switch; besides the opening montage and the basis for the ironic film within the film, there's little mention of these poor, doomed Beals. Mr. Harrison, however, decided that, with the success of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead six years earlier, zombie killers were much more interesting.

Gary Tooze

August 14th, 2013