The House of Seven Corpses (1974)

Directors are notoriously horrible to the actors in their films. Witness the way Friedkin treated the cast of The Exorcist or how Hitchcock told Tippi Hedren that mechanical birds would be used in a scene in The Birds, only for real ones to be used in an incident that she described as "brutal and ugly and relentless."The House of Seven Corpses is all about Eric Hartman (John Ireland, I Saw What You Did), a director who is making a film in an actual haunted house. A zombie is awakened because the actors find The Book of the Dead and use the words in it for authenticity.Disclaimer: The Tibetian Book of the Dead isn't a book of evil spells but actually describes the period of time between death and rebirth.Soon, people start dying left and right, starting with caretaker Edgar Price (John Carradine!) and leading to a grave featuring David, the director's assistant's name. One by one, the cast succumbs to the zombie, who finally takes his girlfriend back to his grave.Director Paul Harrison was a writer on the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf. One wonders how much that experience colors this film. The director is completely out of his mind, screaming and yelling and damaging anyone that comes near to him. Perhaps he's the real monster.This is an enjoyable trifle, but nothing to lose your brains over.

"The House of Seven Corpses" follows a film crew making a movie at a haunted mansion where seven mysterious deaths occurred under varying circumstances over the course of its history. Through the re-enactment of rituals in the film, the crew brings about evil forces that threaten the lives of everyone involved.Before you let the mass of IMDb reviews lambasting this film put you off from giving it a spin, I have to say that, at least as far as mid-'70s supernatural horror flicks go, "The House of Seven Corpses" is not nearly the disasterpiece that it's been painted as. The opening credits play over filmed re- enactments of the seven deaths that occurred in the titular house, ranging from grim suicides to murders, each pausing on a still frame of the dying subject—it's an unsettling opening, and perhaps one of the unexpectedly eeriest credit sequences I've seen.The film benefits from the fact that it's a movie about the making of a movie, which affords it some inventive ground in which it can present scenes to its audience without the audience knowing full-well what is "real" and what is part of the production. It's an easy trick, but an effective and at times mind-bending one. For being a low-budget picture, it does have some nice cinematography, and the mansion locale is remarkably dreary and unsettling. There is a noticeable lull in the middle of the film, but the finale ramps up the action a bit, and it ends on an appropriately bizarre note.A wacky and routinely idiosyncratic performance from John Carradine lends the film a little bit of extra weirdness, while John Ireland plays the overbearing director, and Hollywood's golden age horror starlet Faith Domergue effectively plays an aging actress.Overall, I found "The House of Seven Corpses" to be a competent haunted house horror film. It is very much of a certain stock, and it's not groundbreaking nor perfectly crafted—but in terms of mood, it's effectively weird and atmospheric, which makes up for the nosedive it takes about midway through before breathing some life into itself before its untimely death. 6/10.

Eric Hartman (John Ireland) is filming a movie with a small cast and crew inside The House Of Seven Corpses. No one lives there anymore (they're all dead) except the old caretaker (John Carradine) and he has problems with the way the film is being shot causing him to do what Carradine did best at this stage in his career - be a cantankerous old drunk! The house provides plenty of atmosphere and the film-within-a-film keeps things interesting. There's cool creepy music and a likable enough cast, including veteran Faith Domergue, pushing this one up a little higher than some of it's drive-in-fodder peer. But still, with its slow-moving 70's story, this one is purely for those who dig stuff like "Don't Look In The Basement" or "Grave Of The Vampire" and do not need rationale in their horror films to enjoy them. Seventies haunted house fans - eat your heart out!

John Carradine, John Ireland, and Faith Domergue who as players all saw better days in better films got together for this Grade G horror film about life imitating art in a mysterious mansion.For Carradine it was in those last two decades of his career that he appeared in anything on the theory it was better to keep working no matter what you did and get those paychecks coming in. With that magnificent sonorous voice of his, Carradine was always in great demand for horror pictures and the man did not discriminate in the least in what he appeared in.He plays the caretaker of an old Gothic mansion who movie director John Ireland has rented for his latest low budget slasher film. It's even got a graveyard, but with a missing occupant. Faith Domergue is Ireland's aging star and Carole Wells is the young ingenue.In the last twenty minutes or so most of the cast winds up dead that aren't dead already. The script is so incoherent I'm still trying to figure out the point. I won't waste any more gray matter on it.