31 Flavors of Horror #24: The House Where Evil Dwells

What would getting ready for Halloween be without watching some Haunted House movies. Here's one for the 31 Flavors of Horror that I remember seeing as a kind on USA, some Saturday afternoon, and it messed me up! I remember this one as being bleak, and scary and sad... and I'm sure it doesn't hold up now. But with a cast that's Edward Albert, Doug McClure, and Susan George, how can I not give it another look see?

Bonus: This was directed by the same man who made Motel Hell, and if you've never seen it... go, now! 

31 Flavors of Horror #24
The House Where Evil Dwells

In both the movies and real life, a bitchin' piece of real estate will get snatched up off the market even if it is the site of multiple homicides. In the movies, however, they do tend to come with ghosts. I think it's safe to assume from the title that there'll be ghosts in this.

I think this movie banks on its American audience not knowing anything about 1840's Japan, or Japanese culture in general, beyond what they've seen in Kung Fu pictures. The House Where Evil Dwells opens on a man with a bad, feudal-Japanese pseudo-ponytail haircut visiting a young woman at a country house. She serves him tea, gives him a small sculpture of a beast thats making "the beast with two backs,"and plays that haunting Shamisen string-music that I find completely atonal but mesmerizing. That music is heard by another badly ponytailed man who rushes up to the house to investigate. Ooh, I betcha he's the hubby. He sees the man and woman kissing as shadows through the rice paper wall, and a kimono getting undone.

You can't blame him, I guess, for breaking in like a slo-mo Hulk, through the paper, sword drawn. Our molasses Ninja hubby wrecks the place up and lops loverboy's arm off and then his head. Next, he slashes the Geisha-wife's throat and kills her as well. Then, after doing in her musical instrument - dude, she wasn't that bad- he commits harikiri and... credits.

Well, that was a depressing way to open a movie... and being that it's based on a novel, this doesn't bode well for the rest of the film.

(Bad 80's styles! Over-tanned Susan George! Incredibly uncomfortable Doug McClure! It's all inside...)

One A Week Reviews #10: Ghost Story

Although thirty years old and featuring a cast of movie stars in their seventies and eighties, Ghost Story is worth revisiting. Based on the Peter Straub novel, it plays with all the richness of a well-told story; one given room to breathe.

The Chowder Society - made up of John Houseman, Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Melvyn Douglas - are in the winter of their lives in a wintry, upstate New York town. When one of the twin sons (both played by Craig Wasson) of Edward Wanderley (Fairbanks, Jr.) falls to his death after being scared by... something in his bed, he calls home his other son, Don. Next thing you know, Wanderley is falling to his death after a visitation of his own and Ricky Hawthorne (Astaire) is having run-ins with the fearsome Gregory Bate and his somewhat feral brother, Fenny. The Chowder Society must confess a secret to Don they've held for fifty years if they want to save any of their lives, one that has something to do with the spectre who keeps appearing in various states of rotten decay.

Don has his own memories of an aborted, passionate affair with Alma Mobley (the buttoned-downed Alice Krige) who may just have ties to Eva Galli, the woman who bound together the Chowder Society. Is the the ghost out for revenge, a reincarnation? While Don withdraws from Alma's spookiness, the Chowder boys had to take a far different approach to their Eva. They all followed her around like puppies and fell in love with her. Their foolish, childish bravado in youth- their stupidity- leads to Eva's doom and binds them for life (maybe they shouldn't have put the hats on the bed?). 

The four old goats of the Chowder Society are movie stars through and through. They still bring all the poise and talent of their distinguished careers. The actors who play them in youth (Ken Olin is the best known, playing Houseman's character) acquit themselves, but none match the freight of experience their older counterparts bring. Patricia Neal appears as Astaire's wife. Does being 27 years younger than the 80 year old actor make her a vixen in a May-December romance? I like to think so. Wasson's star never really took off, but he's just as compelling here as in Body Double.

It's really Alice Krige's film in the end though. Even when not seen, her allure, simmering under her glacial poise, runs through - haunts- the film even before she actually appears in the wintery settings. Wasson and Krige are both in their mid-twenties when the film was made, but both seem much older. (They also indulge in copious levels of nudity that you just don't see much anymore in "A-pictures.") Krige, well-known to genre fans as everything from The Borg Queen to Lady Jessica Atreides (in the Children of Dune mini-series) earns her horror and fantasy bona fides here alone.

The jump scares and grotesque make-up effects still play effectively. (Seriously, there are some disgusting make-up effects in this movie.) The slow, sumptuous, storytelling gives the effects space and the story room to unfold. That said, the story keeps chugging along, even if it really is mostly constructed out of two extended flashbacks and nightmares. Beautiful, sometimes startling, well-crafted and acted, Ghost Story is a must see.