La maison du cauchemar

I'm glad some local and old video stores still own VHS titles such as "Delusion". I remember watching it on a cheap video store located on a horrible social security living area. That was in the early 90's. Now, years later, to my surprise, I found the VHS of this tape.

I regret I didn't watch it before. This is the typical slasher flick with the "whodunit?" premise. The plot is very simple and easy to follow. A young cute nurse arrives to a creepy mansion to take care of an invalid and creepy old man. But it's the family of the old man who gives really the creeps to our heroine; including the mysterious butler. Why? Because each of them has weird activities and personalities. Then, "strange" killings start to happen and it's only Meredith who can discover who is behind them.

Well this is a standard slasher with a few decent death scenes and some bizarre sequences including nightmares and suspense.

Watch it only if you are hungry of slasher flicks. I could've enjoyed it more back when the slasher craziness was at it's peek. To these days, it looks dated and cheap. Oh and the VHS copy I found was horrible in all the sense of the word.

"Delusion" (also released as "The House Where Death Lives") follows a young nurse who goes to work at the Langrock estate to care for a dying millionaire. After the arrival of the elderly man's troubled nephew, anyone connected to the home begins to die at the hands of an unseen killer.

This pseudo-psychological slasher film has mostly been forgotten, and registers as one of the more obscure of its peers, though not entirely for good reason. It's not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is reasonably well-shot and captures a claustrophobic, isolated atmosphere. The film falls in familiar trappings and does little to distinguish itself, but it does drum up a bit of intrigue with a couple of its murder scenes (each of which are clobbering administered by a loose table leg, oddly enough) which are well-executed.

The acting is a mix of poor to decent, with Joseph Cotten playing the ailing patriarch, and Patricia Pearcy (of 1976's "Squirm"), who here seems to be overplaying catatonia a bit much, though she does a generally serviceable job. I actually found the letter voice-over narration an interesting way to frame the film, and certainly not one used often, especially in slasher films. The finale comes together a bit quickly and feels slapdash in nature, though it's mildly satisfying.

Overall, "Delusion" is a middling slasher film, part psychological thriller and part murder mystery. It's certainly not original, but it is relatively well-shot and has a few moments scattered throughout that drum up a bit of suspense. Its limited locations exhibit what I presume was a low budget, but there is a hazy air about the film that leaves it feeling a bit like a fever dream. Not great, not terrible—certainly unremarkable, but worth a watch from slasher completists. 6/10.

Meredith moves to the Langrock estate to take care of Langrock himself, an ailing man whose legs no longer work. Langrock has a son who is disturbed in some way, as well as his orphaned teenage grandson Gabriel who returns from a desert commune (or something) to live with the family. Langrock's butler has been working his way through the wine cellar for years, and the cook is proud of her granola...mmm.

Gabriel is a strange young man who likes lurking in shadows, saying or reacting in peculiar ways and generally making people uneasy. Meredith is fascinated by him, but also fears he's behind the brutal death of the guard dog and the other deaths that follow.

A fair amount of the movie also has voice-over by Meredith.

The Embassy Home Entertainment VHS is not the best print; nighttime scenes or those in the cellar are dark and lack definition. The end credits are fairly unreadable.

Trying to find love and comfort isn't always easy. When this nurse goes to a house to take care of a crippled old man, the house of joy turns into a house of pain and death! The old man and his servant hired a nurse to help him out. He's been living in pain. Being paralyzed waist-down, has a son who is psychologically disturbed, has a grandson who lost his parents in a accident. What more can you say? What's worse is when the people living in the house started getting killed all of a sudden. Even the nurse has a tragedy of her own. She writes to her mother about her job and how things are going. However, it turns out that her mother died giving birth to her, and was sexually abused by her father. This movie has a lot of twists and turns. Not boring. It's a cult classic by my book. A must see. 2.5 out of 5 stars

A young nurse named Meredith accepts a job looking after an ageing millionaire in his secluded country home. Almost as soon as she arrives strange events begin occuring. It then becomes apparent that someone is murdering all the occupants of the house and making their deaths look like bizarre accidents. It's left up to Meredith to try and reveal the killer's identity before she ends up next on his list.

Firstly don't be disillusioned by the back of the video blurb that would lead you to believe that DELUSION is 'a chiller in the mould of THE OMEN or REPULSION.' This is pure whodunit? owing more of a knowing nod towards Christie than Carpenter. Although saying that, slasher fans will find the odd thrill here, including one or two decent edge of your seat jolts and a couple of brutal slayings. It looks pretty well budgeted, cleverly shot and the cast do their jobs efficiently. The flicks main problem lies in the fact that it seems to drag far too much in between murders and it began to get a little too tedious towards the end. It's nicely directed and genuinely well acted but lacks the cheese that made most of it's hack and slash counterparts from that era so loveable.

Smart in places, but hardly memorable enough to ever be watched more than once. HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW is a much better effort, rent that instead.