Rish Outfield's reviews
A staple of Channel 20's "Thriller Theater," in my childhood. I believe I referred to it as "Heck House" back then. It seemed much scarier as a kid.
In a very familiar story, four people (a mental medium, a physical medium, a scientist, and his wife) investigate The Belasco Place, known to experts as "the Mount Everest of haunted houses." The plan is to stay in the house for four days. But long before then a fan is turned on, and eventually, something hits it. They experience a page-by-page tour of "The Shirley Jackson Guide To Haunted Mansions:" shaking things, things flying through the air, winds, ominous sounds, doors slamming, an evil black cat attack, death, etc.
It starts well enough, with a very frightening looking house and an age-old premise. The channeling scene was slightly scary (the first one was, anyway), when one of the characters begins talking in a different voice. But it's been done before and after, both to better effect. A lot of it made no sense to me as a boy, but as a kid a lot of things didn't make sense. As an adult, a lot of it still makes no sense. It just leaps from one point to another with no logical reasoning behind it. It may be that Matheson was too close to the book's material, and things that were explained in the book were retained for the movie without their explanations. It was very cerebral, and never really establishes the rules of the film. A gigantic computer-type mechanism is brought in to eliminate the evil power of the house. (?) Annoying subtitles appear to tell you exactly what time of which day events take place. The most attractive female character wears four different outfits in one day.
It was a very English horror film, which, no offense to our Limey brothers, means very dry and very talky. The cast was very small (there's only five or six characters in the whole film), with good old Roddy McDowell, Clive Revill as well. Is that Michael Gough? They do a fine job with the odd material they're given. Brian Hodgeton's music is a lot of humming and drumlike sounds, sometimes spooky, but also annoying and jarring a lot of the time. It was rated PG, which shouldn't influence me negatively (after all, so was Star Wars), but in my experience, it's much harder to make a good PG horror film than a good R one. Agreed? And this one just wasn't that good. One of the problems was simply that the four people are there by choice (for money, in this case) and can leave any time (i.e. there's no external force keeping them there, no broken-down automobile, no storm, no locked gates, no killer dogs, nothing but their own stubborness and greed), yet, even when their lives are put in danger, nobody leaves.
Like I said, I remember it being very scary as a kid, but back then I hadn't seen a lot of Horror. Everything scared me. Watching it now–there's no real scares, just a couple of nice mood-enhancers early on. In fact, it was way too talky and almost dull all these years later. And, my friends, not to give anything away here, but the last line of the movie goes against EVERYTHING we've seen in the last ninety minutes! It . . . it was just another thing that made no sense. Since it was the last thing we were left with, it's what we remember.
Best Scare: The shadow of two statues comes to life on the ceiling.
Line To Remember: "This house . . . it knows we're here."
I'd Recommend It To: This is not one I'll recommend. Nope. I talked to a friend who saw it the same night, and he hated it even more than I did. The book's probably better.