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.

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.

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 HOUSE OF THE DAMNED, architect Scott Campbell (Ron Foster) and his wife, Nancy (Merry Anders), move into a big, fortress-like mansion in order to survey it. It's not long before odd occurrences begin taking place.

That's about it.

The problem with this movie is that it seems like someone decided to make it, simply because they had a big house to make it in, the story being just an afterthought. It's mildly interesting at first, but there's not enough going on, and a whole lot of static scenes with nothing much happening. This all leads up to about 5 minutes of wrap-up at the end that pretty much negates any "horror" involved.

Actually, the one, true point of interest is the all-too-brief- appearance of Richard Kiel (about 2 minutes of screen time)...