Saturday, April 21, 2018

HOUSE OF SHADOWS (1976) * ½


An orphan (Leonor Manso) goes looking for a lost dog and follows it to a creepy old mansion where she witnesses a murder.  As it turns out, the woman she saw has already been dead for twenty years.  She slowly becomes obsessed with her and begins to suspect she's been possessed by the dead woman’s spirit.

Most of House of Shadows is devoted to long scenes of our heroine walking around dark corridors with a flashlight as she investigates weird noises or looks for lost dogs.  If you can’t already guess, this gets tedious quickly.  The laborious, narrated flashbacks are even duller and pretty much stops the movie on a dime every time Manso delves back into the past.  

At least director Richard Wullicher delivers a fairly atmospheric opening sequence.  The climax, though predictable, also has a healthy dose of gothic doom and gloom.  Too bad everything in between is such a dreary, slow-moving, slog.  We do get a nifty scene in which a guy in a wheelchair is placed on a train track, but these murder set-pieces are too few and far between to save the movie.

Manso makes for an OK leading lady.  She certainly fares better as the present-day incarnation of the character than as her ancestral counterpart.  (She looks a bit lost in her period garb.)  Yvonne (The Munsters) De Carlo gets to chew the scenery a bit as Manso’s ward, although not as much as you’d probably expect.  John (Psycho) Gavin is also around as the boring love interest who isn’t given very much to do.

No comments:

Post a Comment