House of the Damned is attempts to rival to "House on Haunted Hill", "Two on a Guillotine", and other 1960's creepy house movies, but at only an hour in length it's definitely a quickie in more ways than one.
The plot tells of an architect and his wife who are asked to visit a remote mansion to map its measurements for the owner, but they find that they are not alone, and several mysterious events happen as they are menaced and frightened over the course of a few days.
There is nothing remarkable to see here although the scenery and photography are fairly good. There's a very impressive shot of the couple standing on the house driveway looking at a lake in the mist, which is just thrown away. There are also several scenes of spookiness, such as the face behind the grille, the hand grabbing the keys from the bedside table, the headless but moving body and the small figure roaming the house in the darkness. All of these could have been been the basic of some very dramatic and frightening scenarios under the right direction, but here they just don't have any life breathed into them. I am guessing that the director did not possess the required skills that would showcase this raw material to it's best effect.
As we only have 62 minutes to spend here, the movie would easily have benefitted from drawing out these wasted shots into bona fide scare scenes. Even the climax is hastily dealt with, and the end credits rush up really quickly. Usually, B movie makers have to pad out their films to make them feature length. Here it seems like the opposite, as if they wanted to trim it mercilessly to make it as short as possible.
The acting is all pretty good, and the music isn't bad. It's just a wasted opportunity to make a better film than the one that we ended up with. An experienced director could have really racked up the tension and wrung plenty of screams out of this content...what a shame
The plot tells of an architect and his wife who are asked to visit a remote mansion to map its measurements for the owner, but they find that they are not alone, and several mysterious events happen as they are menaced and frightened over the course of a few days.
There is nothing remarkable to see here although the scenery and photography are fairly good. There's a very impressive shot of the couple standing on the house driveway looking at a lake in the mist, which is just thrown away. There are also several scenes of spookiness, such as the face behind the grille, the hand grabbing the keys from the bedside table, the headless but moving body and the small figure roaming the house in the darkness. All of these could have been been the basic of some very dramatic and frightening scenarios under the right direction, but here they just don't have any life breathed into them. I am guessing that the director did not possess the required skills that would showcase this raw material to it's best effect.
As we only have 62 minutes to spend here, the movie would easily have benefitted from drawing out these wasted shots into bona fide scare scenes. Even the climax is hastily dealt with, and the end credits rush up really quickly. Usually, B movie makers have to pad out their films to make them feature length. Here it seems like the opposite, as if they wanted to trim it mercilessly to make it as short as possible.
The acting is all pretty good, and the music isn't bad. It's just a wasted opportunity to make a better film than the one that we ended up with. An experienced director could have really racked up the tension and wrung plenty of screams out of this content...what a shame