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.
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