Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984)

Starring horror icon Vincent Price & comedy legend Kenny Everett this camp British horror comedy is a hugely mixed bag.It tells the story of a group of scientists and experts in their field who investigate the mysterious Blood House where 18 people were savagely murdered in one night.When the jokes are on point the movie is really enjoyable, sadly too many jokes fall flat and leave the movie more of a bust than it should have been. With Price & Everett this should have by all rights been a cult classic.To it's credit the film has a lot of imagination, from original death scenes to some fantastic satirical humour!However for every laugh there are three or four poor jokes ranging from silly to cringe inducing.A harmless effort and ahead of it's time, but comes across a bit rushed.The Good:Price and Everett are excellentVery inventive killsSome great gagsWell scoredThe Bad:Not as funny as it should have been Things I Learnt From This Movie:Kenny Everett should have broke Hollywood

Always been a Kenny fan and to have him in the same film as Vincent Price and Not the Nine O'clock News' Pamela Stephenson had such great potential. Sadly it never lived up to it but still glad to watch it.The Good; Love the gag of the stalker being hit in the face with the brier and the Headstone Manor hall for 'Tired businessmen/Teenage Girls Summer Camp'. Vincent Price's stuff is great. Pamela Stephenson is just as gorgeous naked as we always thought she'd be (surprisingly Cleo Rocos who was always the cheesecake in Kenny's shows keeps her clothes on?). Adore the pub singalong, Don Warrington and Gareth Hunt make a very funny gay couple and the surgery scene is funny. The parodies are also pretty good, especially the Carrie one. The Bad; Lots I'm afraid, the plot makes no sense, the direction is leaden and the story just doesn't hang together. It doesn't work as a horror film or a zany comedy and some of the gags just aren't funny and go on for far too long (to my shame I missed the 'Do you like my mole?' joke until I'd watched it for the second time. Still wasn't funny)The Other; did you notice there was a story about AIDS on the cover of the gay magazine Stephen and Elliot read? Kenny Everett was a closet homosexual and would sadly later die of the disease, I wonder if this was put in deliberately? The scene where Don Warrington's character is killed by a blade emerging from a phone receiver is very similar to 'Dr Phibes Rises Again' also starring Vincent Price. All told I think it's something of a wasted opportunity

Bloodbath at the House of Death is set in rural Endland where a team of scientists arrive at Headstone House to investigate strange radioactive paranormal activity. In charge is Dr. Lukas Mandeville (Kenny Everett) aided by his young assistant Dr. Barbara Coyle (Pamela Stephenson), after an awkward encounter with the locals in a nearby village Mandeville & Coyle arrive at Headstone House & find the rest of the team waiting there. As the night passes the scientists start to experience strange phenomenon, eventually they are killed off one by one & replaced by replica Devil worshipping aliens.This British production was co-written, co-produced & directed by Ray Cameron & is generally disliked as an unfunny horror comedy spoof with zero plot & who am I to disagree with such an accurate appraisal? Made at the time when both horror & leading man Kenny Ecerett were popular it probably seemed like a good idea at the time to combine the two, quite why Everett agreed to be in this crap is a mystery to be honest. With virtually no story to speak of it's left to the loosely connected little comedy sketches that try to spoof & mock various horror films including The Haunting (1963), Carrie (1976), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), An Emerican Werewolf in London (1981), The Entity (1982), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), all the teen slashers that were big business back then & even references Star Wars (1977) with little success is has to be said. The main problem for me was that Bloodbath at the House of Death is just painfully unfunny, sure it comes down to personal preference but I thought the humour, jokes & gags were just lame. At just under 90 minutes long there is very little story here & none of it makes sense one bit as things happening for no apparent reason with no apparent consequence. Why is Everett given a false leg? Why not kill the scientists rather than try to scare them away?Bloodbath at the House of Death really does feel like a five minute comedy show sketch drawn out to feature film length, not one of British horror's finest moments.The film is reasonably well made & spoofs various scenes in films like the pub scene in An American Werewolf in London, the chest-burster scene in Alien, the rape scene in The Entity & even has a character decapitated by a Stars Wars style Light Saber. The special effects are variable, the E.T. spoof at the end looks awful for instance. There's some blood splatter & a couple of decapitations but not much gore.Filmed in Hertfordshire here in the UK I suspect this had a fairly low budget & again I don't really understand why TV comedian & radio DJ Kenny Everett agreed to do it, surely he didn't think it would be his big break in films? The acting is all over the place with some terrible performances & other's who just go for it. Horror legend Vincent Price is wasted in what turned out to be his last British horror film.Bloodbath at the House of Death make the Scary Movie series seem like classics, I'm sorry but I just didn't find any of it funny & it ended up disappointing as both a horror film & a comedy. A waste of some good talent & a waste of potential.

Bloodbath at the House of Death is a strange beast, it has the feel of a Dario Argento Film in places with the P.O.V kills and the tripped out camera work! Others it's a bawdy seaside postcode with the kind of sight gag that made Kenny Everett a household name. As such it sits between two stools occupying a strange place in terms of Genre cinema, is it a comedy, a horror or a thriller. To be honest I doubt the cast crew or writers new at the time either!Vincent Price for the love of all that is holy what are you doing in this??? It's a far cry from Dr Phibes and theatre of Blood! Did it amuse me, yeah! Did it scare me, only the special effects. The kills are good the ending feels akin to trapping your head in a door repeatedly but overall an interesting diversion. Not without merit but it is hugely silly!