The Old Dark House (1963)

You won't be disappointed!

The Worst Film Ever

Just perfect...

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

I know that "comparisons are odious" but I spent the whole of this film thinking, "I'd love to see Carry On Screaming again". It's pleasant enough fun, and Robert Morley, Joyce Grenfell & Fenella Fielding go a long way towards making it more fun and memorable than it deserves to be. But for me, it suffers from having a lead (Tom Poston) who just reminded me how of good Bob Hope was in The Cat & the Canary, or Harry H Corbett/Jim Dale were in Carry on Screaming. But the twist on the killer's identity was a nice surprise, and the happy/not happy ending raised a ghoulish smile as well. All in all, the film has a great 60s kitsch comedy horror vibe, but now I'm just itching to re-watch Carry On Screaming, if only to see Fenella Fielding turning up the vamp-setting to 11.

An extremely strained and wholly indifferent comedy-thriller. Most of the labored jokes and the way overdone comic relief situations back fire or fizz out like damp squibs, despite (or maybe because of) desperate play-acting by the inept hero who has no charisma whatever.I will admit that the inept script, plus the heavily way-overdone and over emphatic direction does not help. Nor do most of the players come to the hero's rescue. Even normally reliable people are defeated by the totally unfunny script and the producer's labored direction. Admittedly, the film has been lensed on a copious budget. and production values are not bad.Unfortunately, the charmless hero figures in just about every scene and thus succeeds in spoiling just about all of the producer's attempts to make this old dark house shine with genuine merriment and even a bit of suspense.In fact, I am puzzled. Who is this movie actually designed to entertain?

JB Priestley's 1927 novel 'Benighted' was adapted very loosely into 1932's classic 'The Old Dark House', which was directed by James Whale in his own very distinct style. This in turn has been adapted equally loosely by Director William Castle for Hammer films.'The Old Dark House' stars Tom Poston, an American actor with a wonderful permanently harassed expression as Tom Penderel, a car dealer who delivers a car to a large mansion for Casper Femm, whom he subsequently discovers is dead. He meets Cecily Femm (Jeanette Scott) who warns him to leave before 'the family' find him. 'The family' are spoken of in dread tones.The worst excesses of this production are demonstrated with the arrival of Fenella Fielding's Morgana. As she floats down the stairs to greet Penderel, the 'comedy music' (an unnecessary irritation in my view – if something is funny, the audience will laugh; if we need music to tell us something is funny, there is something wrong. Here, it works directly against any dark vein of humour events may be trying to evoke) accompanies the camera's lingering obsession with her breasts. A sign of the times of course, but worlds away from the original Universal version.There are positives and negatives about this, but the overall effect is disappointing. The cast is made up of uniformly excellent, eccentric performers that seem curiously underwritten. The story is a drawing room mystery, and I have no problem with that, but it is 'enlivened' by comedy routines so pedestrian (although enthusiastically played) they hardly fulfill the promise of the publicity that 'you'll die laughing.' If the flamboyant cast had been directed by an equally unconventional director, things could have been pushed into a less in-house style. Having said that, William Castle went onto produce the acclaimed 'Rosemary's Baby' five years later.

Campy comedy about an expatriate American who sells cars in England and gets invited by an eccentric millionaire to visit the man's ancestral estate. The ancestral mansion turns out to be something right out of a Charles Addams' cartoon (Addams in fact drew the opening sequence) and it is chock full of oddball relatives. One by one, during a torrential storm, they are knocked off by unseen hands. I'd not seen this film before, but it was easy enough to spot the killer. Tom Poston plays the befuddled American, and Robert Morley plays a gun-toting member of the nutty clan. Plenty of slapstick bits but no scares, as one might have expected from the title. Director William Castle helmed this remake of a 1937 classic, and has a lot of fun with it. Great musical score, and some fetching females to keep up the interest. Excellent sets and color. Worth a look.