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THE
HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD
6/10
UK
1970 : Peter DUFFELL : 102 mins
An enterprising
if cash-strapped rival to Hammer, British independent studio Amicus made
half-a-dozen ‘portmanteau’ horror movies in less than a decade - Dr
Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), this
one, Tales from the Crypt and Asylum (1972) and Vault
of Horror (1973) – most of which featured Peter Cushing and/or Christopher
Lee. Though the two 1972 entries are the pick of the bunch, all were hit-and-miss
affairs and House that Dripped Blood – based on short stories by
Robert Bloch, author of the novel on which Hitchock’s Psycho was
based – is more hit-and-miss than most.
The limp ‘framework’
story sees a jaded copper (John Bennett) investigating the mysterious
disappearance of horror-movie star Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee), who’d
been renting a large detached house on his patch. One of the copper’s
junior colleagues relates a trio of grim tales about events that befell
the house’s previous tenants. The local estate-agent then provides the
fourth story.
1)
Method for Murder. A writer (Denholm Elliott) starts to believe
that one of his fictional creations – a maniacal strangler – has come
to life and is lurking around the house with homicidal intent. Pretty
standard sting-in-the-tail stuff familiar to viewers of Roald Dahl’s
Tales of the Unexpected from TV. One or two effective shock moments
when director Duffell zooms into the strangler’s deformed face, but somewhat
underpowered and plodding.
2)
Waxworks. A solitary old gent (Peter Cushing) becomes fascinated
with a waxwork of Salome in the town’s wax museum. Problems ensue. Easily
the most incoherent, cobbled-together and dated of the quartet. Fails
to deliver suspense or shocks, but campy laughs are fairly thick on the
ground – Cushing’s pseudo-trippy, dry-ice-infested dream sequence has
to be seen to be believed. Groovy threads sported by both Cushing and
Joss Ackland as his old pal who pays a visit. The moment when they greet
each other at Cushing’s door will be of interest to football fans, especially
adherents of Manchester United.
3)
Sweets to the Sweet. A hyper-strict father (Christopher Lee) employs
an attractive widow (Nyree Dawn-Porter) to look after his mollycoddled
little girl (Chloe Franks). But why is Daddy so scared of the moppet?
Despite the meaningless title, this is an effective little chiller in
the mould of The Innocents and The Others. Lee has played
unpleasant characters for decades, but this one beats the lot: Saruman,
Dracula and Dooku would surely cross the road to avoid this martinet.
The scene where he hurls his daughter’s new doll into the fire prefigures
Mommie Dearest. Dawn-Porter suggests this action is somewhat cruel.
“But necessary!” Lee shoots back. Dawn-Porter struggles to get a handle
on her role, but big Lee and teeny-tiny Franks go at it – and each other
– hammer-and-tongs.
4)
The Cloak. “I’m afraid, sir, I do not patronise the kinema” rasps
Geoffrey Bayldon as a very Transylvanian costume-shop proprietor, engaging
small-talk with Pertwee’s Henderson as the latter, filming Night of
the Bloodsuckers nearby, purchases an unusually authentic vampire’s
cloak. Problems ensue. Pretty much played entirely for laughs, this is
the most enjoyable of the four episodes with Pertwee – in a dry-run of
the dynamic-dandy mode later seen in Doctor Who – a scream as a
British Vincent Price type. The greatest Who there never was, Bayldon
only appears in the one scene, but it’s a classic – and not just because
it’s Worzel Gummidge sharing the screen with Catweazle. Ingrid Pitt pops
up essentially playing herself, and there are some nice little throwaway
gags on the set of the exceedingly tawdry-looking Bloodsuckers movie.
Not exactly Targets, of course, but it’ll do.
A film of
two halves then, with the latter two stories making the whole thing worth
the bother. Obtaining the services of Cushing and Lee (though this
is one of those annoying films that features both but never together
in the same scene) presumably took a massive chunk out of the available
budget. Special effects are of the shoestring variety, when they exist
at all – the ‘bat shadow’ technique during The Cloak pretty much
defines ‘cheap-and-cheerful.’
We get a reprise
of this not-so-speciall effect at the end, when the hard-headed copper
unwisely pays a visit to The House and finds more than he’d bargained
for. Then the estate agent appears to address us directly: “Have you worked
out the house’s secret yet? Precisely!” Nobel Prizes have been awarded
for solving less complex puzzles. Because the main problem with The
House that Dripped Blood is that the house doesn’t drip blood at all
– the premises in question are, at best, tangential to the film’s ‘action,’
and in the Waxworks story, the house barely features at all. At
least the framework was trying something different from the inevitable
“they’re all dead and/or damned” used in Dr Terror, Torture Garden,
Crypt and Vault – but it isn’t a patch on the genuinely creepy
framing-device from Asylum. While this one never convinces as a
chiller, it remains serviceable late-night-TV fare.
29th March,
2004
(seen on TV, 28th March)
by Neil
Young
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