Women are being found murdered with their eyeballs torn out. Meanwhile, old Boris Karloff calls his relatives together to read his last will and testament. Inside his crumbling mansion, Boris keeps a collection of his family heirlooms, creepy life-sized toy dolls. When Boris passes in the night, the family members grow antsy about the fortune. The toys then come to life and begin killing off the guests.
House of Evil is one of four movies that Boris made South of the Border for co-directors Jack Hill and Juan Ibanez. They proved to be his final features. This one has an “Everything but the Kitchen Sink” approach that grafts a killer toy movie onto the bones of an Old Dark House mystery (with a serial killer subplot in there to boot). When you’re making a cluster of movies in Hollywood while another crew is adding footage down in Mexico, films like this are bound to be uneven due to their very nature. Calling this one “uneven” is extremely generous. It’s not Karloff’s worst by far, but it is definitely pretty rough in places.
Although House of Evil has enough ideas for four movies, it really is a slapdash affair. While the set-up is sturdy enough, the seams really start to show as the film drags on. The ending especially feels piecemeal and the way the various plot threads are brought together is unsatisfying to say the least.
It’s not all bad news though. The close-ups of the toys are fairly effective. There’s one kind of cool scene where the life-sized automaton kills his dance partner. The cutaways to the exterior of the mansion, which is clearly just a painting, are good for a laugh too.
Boris is surprisingly spry as the crotchety old man. He seems invested in the role and because of that, the film has a pulse whenever he’s on screen. Conversely, the scenes without Karloff drag and suffer from a lot of dull exposition. It’s in these long stretches where the market value of House of Evil plummets.
AKA: Dance of Death. AKA: Macabre Serenade.
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