Director – Sharron Miller, Screenplay – David O’Malley, Producer – William Jackson, Photography – Ken Gibb, Music – Stan V. Worth. Production Company – Myriad Cinema International.
Cast
John Ericson (Talmudge), Ivor Francis (The Mortician), Leslie Paxton (Marie). 1:- Judith Novgrod (Miss Sibilier). 2:- Burr DeBenning (Growski), Kathie Gibboney (Julie), Elizabeth MacRae (Mrs Lundquist). 3:- Charles Aidman (Detective Malcolm Tollivar), Bernard Fox (Inspector Wendell McDowal). 4:- Richard Gates (Dennis Cantwell)
Plot
Talmudge is heading home to his wife after spending the evening with his mistress but the taxi drops him on the wrong street. Searching for a telephone, he is welcomed inside from the rain at what he realises is a mortuary. The mortician tells him the strange stories of some of the bodies that lie at rest. 1:- A schoolteacher is terrorised by strange masked children who invade her apartment. 2:- Growski is a serial killer who lures women to his apartment and kills them while filming the act on camera. 3:- Malcolm Tollivar, who is regarded as the top American detective, is visited by a British colleague Inspector Wendell McDowal, who enjoys the same acclaim in the UK. As they dine together and compare stories, an anonymous note is delivered telling Tollivar that someone he knows is going to be killed in three days’ time. 4:- As businessman Denis Cantwell goes out for a lunchbreak, he enters a building where a mystery agency keeps him imprisoned.
The House of the Dead – which should not be confused with the videogame of the same name or Uwe Boll’s film adaptation House of the Dead (2003) – is an obscure horror anthology. It enjoyed sporadic release in 1978 and 1980. It was briefly marketed under the title The Alien Zone, even though it contains no SF elements, presumably so as to bandwagon aboard the big success being enjoyed at the time by Alien (1979). It was an independent film shot in Oklahoma. It is the sole film directed by Sharron Miller who subsequently worked as an episodic tv director up until the early 2000s.
The horror Anthology has a long history going back to the silent era and classic works like Dead of Night (1945). It became a genre unto itself in the 1960s/early 70s with UK’s Amicus Films and their string of anthologies following Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965). There were a number of independents that copied that success, which one suspects is what Sharron Miller was trying to do. There was also the huge success of televised anthologies such as The Twilight Zone (1959-63) and The Outer Limits (1963-5). The 1980s brought a revival of the film with Creepshow (1982) and revivals of various of the 1950s/60s tv series, while the 2000s has seen a renewed popularity with a series of multi-director anthologies.
The wraparound essentially follows the same set-up used by Amicus with Dr Terror and Tales from the Crypt (1972) – a mysterious harbinger of death tells stories of the bizarre fates that befell people, before arriving at a predictable twist ending. The first story (none of the stories are given names) is the most forgettable wherein schoolteacher Judith Novgrod returns home to find sinister children (although maybe not children according to the mortician) in masks in her house who proceed to attack her. The episode is too brief to amount to anything and nothing is explained about why things are occurring.
(l to r) The Mortician (Ivor Francis) tells stories to John Ericson
The second story is a noted improvement. This consists of Burr DeBenning, the film’s only recognisable face, a minor tv actor of the 1970s, who plays a serial killer. The segment could be considered an early variant on the Found Footage film – it is shot from the point-of-view of a film camera in DeBenning’s apartment as we see a montage of various scenes where he charms women into coming to his house and then kills them.
The best of the stories is the third, which is not really even a horror story. This brings Charles Aidman and Bernard Fox as respectively the top American and British detectives together for a mutual admiration society. Someone is clearly a fan of detective fiction and the characters are written and played with an amusingly larger-than-life quality – none more so than the opening scene where Aidman analyses a murder scene and then the two meet. The story, for reasons not entirely clear, then has the two stalking and outsmarting the other, all conducted in an appealingly over-the-top style full of unexpected twists not unakin to the joyous game that was Sleuth (1972).
The fourth story is reminiscent of the Blind Alleys episode in Tales from the Crypt. Richard Gates is a businessman who, for purposes unknown, is imprisoned in an abandoned building by a series of gates and doors that force him to go through a maze. There seems some sort of obscure morality at play where the process reduces him to appearing as a homeless person and in exactly the same position as the beggar he brushed off just before entering the building.
