The House of Seven Corpses (1973)

A film crew is making a low-budget horror film in an old mansion watched over by a man named Edgar Price (John Carradine) in which a number of the family members who have dwelt in the house have met horrible deaths.  The director, Eric Hartman (John Ireland) is basing the film loosely around what happened.

Although most of what is in the script was made up, at least some of the Beal family that inhabited the house appear to have been into black magic, as production assistant David (Jerry Strickler) finds a stash of books - among them, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  The book becomes a prominent prop within the film, and Eric has his lead actress Gayle Dorian (Faith Domergue) read from it.

Soon, strange things begin to happen.  Gayle's cat turns up dead, strange rumblings are heard - and then a shambling corpse first murders Price and goes on to take out the rest of the cast and crew in ways resembling the different deaths suffered by members of the Beal family.

This movie would be absolutely laughable if it wasn't so tedious.  For instance, anyone with even the slightest knowledge of what the Tibetan Book of the Dead is knows that it's a guide through the afterlife in order to reach incarnation.  In the film, it has incantations mentioning Hebrew demons and the rivers of Hades - things that do not figure into Tibetan Buddhism whatsoever.  Plus, we have an old book with an English title on the outside, but which seems to be written in Latin on the inside.

And, thus, you have it for the rest of the movie.  Even when the dead begin to walk it is completely out of nowhere, and their motivations are never fleshed out.  Are they killing just to kill?  Do they want a hot blonde to share a grave?  Maybe they just want revenge against horrible cinema?  Wait, is there more than one corpse and, if so, where did the others suddenly go?

The answers escape me, and I think I'll just let them go.  I might care more, or might just have enjoyed the ride, if the pace wasn't glacial and the characters unlikeable.  And poor John Carradine and Faith Domergue having to work on something like this toward the end of their careers.

The House of Seven Corpses (1973)
Time: 90 minutes
Starring: John Ireland, Faith Domergue, John Carradine
Director: Paul Harrison


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more