House of Mystery A (1934) and B (1961)
A.) IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes (and it felt like a lot longer), rated a generous 4.9/10.0 by 241 time wasters.
Genre: No mystery to it.
Verdict: B o r i n g.
In 1934 a swaggering American adventurer defiles an ancient Hindu relic and is cursed. He scoots with a dusky maiden and becomes a cripple – due to the curse, it seems. Meanwhile, the curse misfires and falls on those who funded his adventure, though none of them violated the relic. Guilt by association it seems to be. Two die.
Swagger, now in a wheel chair, has invited the surviving benefactors to his mansion – an old dark house, the fraternity bothers hoped – to sort things out. Sorting involves the investors having their necks broken. Dusky maiden goes about lighting incense to portend 1960s hippies. More necks go crack.
Plod appears and makes Barney (remember Barney?) look smart. More necks snap. Meanwhile a plumber lurks about the pipes. Got is so far? If not, doesn’t matter.
Swagger blows it when he dismisses dusky maiden in preference to the snow white nurse. Some nurse. She doesn’t realise he can stand erect. Dusky takes revenge with her house-trained gorilla who hides behind a sliding panel between murderous gigs. The annoying insurance salesman saves the day. The end. About twenty minutes past endurable.
If I got it right: Dusky and Swagger had used this ape to kill off the other investors, and were now finishing the job. If so, why Swagger did not consider that the ape might be used against him is the real mystery here. The other possibility is that Dusky was travelling around with her ape in the checked baggage and doing the killing while Swagger dallied with snow white. Dusky then returns to find she has been displaced. Yet she continues siccing the man in the ape suit on the other investors. See? Nope, me neither.
Clay Clement as Swagger steals the show. He goes from swaggering plunderer to pathetic cripple to scheming murder and then piteous victim. Tour de force acting in a waste of celluloid.
B.) IMDb meta-data is 55 minutes, rated 6.4/10.0 by 134 cinematizens.
Genre: Spooky
Verdict: Taut with a twist.
Same title but this is a different story about a young couple who find a house for sale that is too good to be true for the price. They find out why.
Vernon Sewell wrote and directed and it is tight and atmospheric with some fine players. It has an ambitious double flashback which makes the summary tricky. Suffice it to saying the empty house they find a woman who welcomes them and shows them around in a cold and detached manner of a McKinsey manager. They ask about the low price and she says some buyers have been put off …. by the ghost.
Ghost. Bah, hum bug. They have seen A Christmas Carol and ghosts don’t scare them, but how did such bunkum start, they ask. First flashback is to another, earlier young couple who bought the house and found it odd, which leads to the second, nested flashback to the couple who built it. Mr. Builder was an electrical engineer who wired everything up to the max.
Mrs Builder made off with another man, or did she? It seems she didn’t. An episode of Midsomer uses a similar plot device with home electricity. Then the engineer dies at his bench. I never did fathom whether this was suicide, accident, murder, or fate. Or why the dog was there. But with his death the missing wife and lover turn up under garden gnomes. Hmmm.
Earlier the first young couple have visitations from the engineer. These are unnerving so they call in a ghost hunter, Colin Gordon, who bores ghosts to death with longwinded explanations done far better in The Stone Tape (1972). The fraternity brothers dropped off here. Ghost Hunter is sure something spectral is present but it is beyond his gizmos so he calls in a medium who goes into a trance, which she calls a séance. (Briefly conscious, the fraternity brothers shouted that a séance was a circle holding hands, not an old biddy closing her eyes.)
Spoiler.
The welcoming woman ends the story there and as the prospective buyers watch she transforms into the murdered wife and fades into the wall. Superb.
But of course in Sydney the only question is: How much was the house? Was there a garage?
The 1961 film was made as a B picture but was trimmed for television.