It’s always hard to wrap my head around the fact that movies like these were coming out at the same time as game changers like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist. And yet I keep watching them when I come across them, mainly because they star familiar faces. So did any of these give me even a hint of a scare?
ARNOLD (1973)
I added this one to my movie collection to ensure I had every horror movie in which Roddy McDowall stars only to find he barely makes it past the halfway mark.
This quirky gothic horror comedy is loaded with famous faces, including Stella Stevens as a new bride who makes her entrance to a lively song about her fiancé. The catch? The man she’s marrying is dead. And in a coffin. And his will says she must spend every minute of her life with him by her side if she wants to collect his inheritance.
At the reading of the will, the family learns that the deceased left a secret stash of money hidden somewhere in the house.
And then, people begin to die gruesome deaths. As in all these whodunit murder mystery mansion movies, there’s backstabbing, jealousy, revenge, scandalous affairs, someone spying through a hole in the eyes of a portrait, and a bumbling detective on the case.
Along with the silliness, there are some macabre moments, spooky nightmare sequence, and Jamie Farr in black face as a Middle Eastern servant. WTF?
Highlights for me included a cat playing with a severed foot, and a decapitation by guillotine that is perhaps the funniest moment in the movie once it’s discovered, but overall, this isn’t one I’d find myself revisiting…even though I now own it.
THE HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES (1973)
This flick starts strong by using echoing sound effects that were so prevalent in early 1970s horror movies to give them a trippy vibe. Plus, the opener is a montage of people being murdered in a mansion.
Then we get to the dull part, which is most of the movie. A film crew is making a movie in that mansion. The deaths that took place in the mansion are merely mentioned, and we never get any substantial discovery of what actually happened at the location in the past. WTF? A little deep diving would have given the characters something to do.
Instead, we watch one sequence after another of the crew filming scenes for their horror movie, which look like they’re from a better movie than the one we’re watching. We also get John Carradine in a minor role as the caretaker, and there’s a mutilated cat moment that’s shockingly gruesome for the time at which this was released.
It’s not until one hour in that they decide to use a black magic book they find in the mansion for a scene in their movie. The book is actually The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which isn’t even a black magic book, but a religious text, so what the hell?
Anyway, without explanation beyond the reading of the book, a few dead bodies rise from a graveyard that’s conveniently located right outside the mansion, so we have to assume that messing with the book is what triggered the zombies. These are gnarly looking corpses, and it’s pretty creepy as they roam around in the shadows, but even the horror fun fails to bring anything cohesive to the plot. You really only turn to this one if you’re a fan of horror flicks of this era and have seen most of the others.
TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1973)
This period piece set in the late 1800s comes from the same director as Arnold and features much of the same cast because they were filmed simultaneously. Thing is, while this film flirts with the idea of being a horror film, when it comes down to it, it’s really a mystery.
John Carradine owns a wax museum, and the film opens with him and his deformed assistant dumping a pretty woman into the wax to make a new display piece for the museum. Like the array of “wax museum” films that came before and after it, you would think that would be the whole horror plot and that the deformed assistant would be a killer.
Nope. Carradine is killed, and those that want to get their hands on his business come to stay in the museum. Does that mean sinister, devious plots to take each other out and people being killed left and right? Nope. Even the deformed dude is a sympathetic character and not actually a monster.
There’s a detective investigating Carradine’s death, and there are plenty of delusions and nightmares of the famous murderers from the macabre museum displays coming to life, but that’s about it. This movie is super boring.
As you’d expect, there’s a final fight around Carradine’s all but forgotten wax vat, and a killer is at last unmasked, but it’s incredibly anticlimactic. No matter how much you love the wax museum horror movie concept, this is a bottom of the barrel option.
