House of the Dead

House of the Dead

Plot:

A lascivious traveling businessman manages to get himself lost in a downpour. (And no, you haven’t heard this one before.) Finding the locals unfriendly, he imposes on the good graces of a mortician to make a phone call. Unfortunately, this particular undertaker is a bit unusual. (Well duh.) In keeping with his odd idea of gratitude, he will not let the man leave until he has related the tales of his “customers”, and how they came to find themselves in such a sorry state.

Comments:

No, I'm not reviewing yet another damnable Uwe Boll film. Much like 'Gallery of Horrors', the 1978 'House of the Dead' goes by many handles; 'Alien Zone', 'Last Stop on 13th Street', and various etceteras. This menagerie of monikers stems in part from the fact that the film was allowed to lapse into public domain, and if several warning klaxons are not sounding in your head at this point, you haven't seen enough truly awful horror movies.
Now what we have before us today is yet another obscure anthology film, a peculiar genre for which I'll always have a soft spot. If I tend to be a bit more forgiving of films like this, it's simply because the anthology film is a pretty forgiving medium in itself. (A varied presentation, and every clunker is short and fleeting.) On the other hand, a cute structure can only mask so many sins, and 'House' needs to do more praying than a pregnant nun.

We open upon our framing device accompanied by the haunting sounds of 'The Saddest Melody is the Sound of Goodbye', quite likely the most maudlin god-awful little ditty I have ever heard in my life. (And at this point I feel I should inform you I'm the only straight man in America that owns upwards of five Tori Amos albums.) Our protagonist is one Mr. Talmudge, a cheating jerk who takes a confused rain drenched cab ride from his mistress' flat and winds up in a decrepit funeral home in the middle of nowhere. As a framing device, there are certainly worse. The dark dreamy earth tones the entire movie is filmed in may be born out of poor film stock, but they certainly give an atmospheric shot in the arm. Add in Ivor Francis' role as the disarming yet creepy mortician, and this is probably the highpoint of the whole damn film. Unfortunately that's because what's around the bend is likely to wow absolutely no one.

Our first tale concerns Miss Sibiler a typical fictional schoolteacher. (Something like Margaret Hamilton with roid rage.) From dealing with Massachusetts school board thugs, I don't really have a problem buying the idea of a pedagogue who reacts to cheerful children as if they were gibbons wielding airhorns. (Hell, I know I do.) The problem with is that the script never grows past such unpolished setups. She's simply a mean lady folks, here's some generic ironic comeuppance for you! We waste no time getting to it; that evening at home, someone seems to be playing a not so friendly trick on our public sector misanthrope. At first it's simply the occasional odd noise, but things get progressively weirder. Objects disappear, figures move about in the darkness, and it seems someone has cut the phone lines. Though this type of scenario is often bludgeoned in slasher films, I have to say a combination of murky film and a strange empty house made the story eerier than one would think. And when group of silent kids in Halloween masks show up from out of nowhere, I have to admit I was sprouting goose bumps. Then, the kids take off their masks, and their all wearing fake hillbilly teeth, and the camera goes all green and woogy like a Roger Corman version of an acid trip, and well, the whole thing should have just quit while it was ahead.

In our next story, if you can call it that, a Ted Bundy wannabe has a hidden camera installed in his living room so that he can video tape himself strangling women. Which he does. Um, the end. Well, there's also the interminable chatting, and eventually the police catch up to him, and then the tables have turned and he's on tape, which is a stunning indictment of society's… something. Look, I don't know either.
It's rather off-putting seeing women treated contemptuously treated like this, but if you're a different sort than I, you could chalk it up to realism. (Yeah, yeah Eli Roth. Shut the hell up and hit fast forward.) Frankly the whole mess together is less of a narrative than it is a useless hunk of parsley on this stale blue plate special.

The following tale is the most competently produced of the lot, although it's unfortunately also the blandest. An eccentric American tv detective type meets his English counterpart, a fastidious Scotland Yard sleuth played well by our only name talent, Bernard Fox. (Who older readers would recognize as Dr. Bombay and you young whippersnappers might place as good old Winston from 'The Mummy".)
The world's foremost homicide detectives decide to enter into something of investigative duel. It just so happens that when at lunch together, the Yank receives a note saying that someone he knows will be killed in three days. Well, it's most obvious who the culprit is, and the paint by number nature of the production really doesn't allow for any substance.
It's an innocuous little sequence, but it needed a hell of a lot more nuance.

The finale is the best story of the lot, oddly enough in part because it's not really trying to make a lick of sense. We open to find a businessman by the name of Cantwell (Which again, is probably symbolic of something or other.) as he thinks testy thoughts about coworkers and random passersby. Entering into an apparently empty department store, he instead finds himself locked in an insidious instrument of torture, fully at the mercy of unseen and seemingly inhuman tormentors. Force-fed a diet of pure alcohol, by the time he leaves he has become the bedraggled double of the bums he callously passed by on his appointment with cruel fate.
There's a harrumphing social message here somewhere about everyone being a harsh break away from being a derelict, but like the politics of a 'Billy Jack' it's only remotely convincing if you're unfamiliar with that little horribly insensitive thing called reality. Leaving such fuzzyheaded annoyance aside the segment works very well in an artaudian sense. The situation is logically absurd, but so primaly horrifying that it still grabs you despite any pretense.

This only leaves us to wrap things up within the framing device, where the undertaker informs that all of his clientele have something in common. (Besides the obvious moribund smelliness.) They were all lacking that quintessential something that makes people, well, people. Like so many of their time, they jettisoned basic human compassion and instead entertained their worst impulses for vanity, petty spite, or perhaps say, infidelity. (Dhun dhun dhun!)
You know where this is going, and you probably knew it all along, but I will say our dog's dissolution comes from an unexpected and satisfactory source.

Unfortunately, 'House' doesn't seem to care very much either. The push to get the movie filmed and done with almost seems to have leaked onto the stock itself. Why does Miss Sibiler hate kids with such simple-minded vehemence? Is minor self-centeredness really enough motivation for cold-blooded murder? This is short-strokes filmmaking, concerned with getting from point A to point B but not with giving us any meat between.
It's unfortunate, for I had to venture a guess as to what makes a flick like this fail compared to, say, a 'Campfire Tales', it would be a simple lack of application. It's as goofy as a cult-worthy gem like 'Tales', and honestly it's a little better made. However, it really doesn't seem to be trying all that hard to entertain us, and thus doesn't endear itself to the likes of me. There are some brief moments of atmosphere, even a shock or two to dig up, but it's pretty under whelming in total.

Did I mention this is the only horror film I know of filmed entirely in Okalahoma?
So, there's that.

3.5