Bloodbath At The House Of Death (1984)

Via Here

I first heard about this film watching a DVD of Grindhouse trailers.

Not that I'm fascinated by everything i've never heard of nor am I a Kenny Everett fan. It's never been unusual for British TV to spin off into the movies from On The Buses to Bless This House and made in the year I was born (1984), it has all the necessary requirements of the time- Pamela Stephenson. but I was instantly enthused about seeing this horror spoof. As I listened to the story of the making of the film, it's a very sad tale of a film that found it's self a year later with his star on wain and being given an overly conservative '18' certificate.

It's not very good but it's not for lack of trying. They pile in jokes wherever possible (great early one- "Headstone Manor- "Businessman's weekend retreat and Girls' summer camp") and it's certainly interesting to see Everett work on a bigger canvas as is plain to see in the trailer-

Looking for a reason(s) why it doesn't work, it may be that Everett or (writers) Barry Cryer and Ray Cameron (also the director) had never had to sustain a story over 80mins. Everett and especially Cryer are/were masters of the short skit but a feature is a whole different animal. 
Maybe it's the spoof genre. I'm struggling to think of a harder sub-genre to work in. Making a great spoof film is less an art than alchemy- Even the 'masters' of the genre like Mel Brooks and Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker were capable of one or two good examples in a list of shlocky efforts.
But I think the central problem is there are too many characters for the story- Yes, it's traditional for horror movies to have lots of disposable characters but here, there are 8 when there should have been 4 perhaps.
Maybe it's that the characters are not despatched quickly enough. I love Don Warrington and John Fortune and i like that they're in this film but here they're one note characters, who spend a lot of time with not much to do except play the wall.
The best actor, with the best lines and best character is Vincent Price playing for all intents and purposes... Vincent Price. Obviously you don't generally get to hear him swear but hearing him prissily tell people to piss off is great.

At best, Bloodbath At The House Of Death is comfortably better than the 'Scary Movies' put together but that is unfortunately not good enough.


I watched Bloodbath At The House Of Death (1984) on DVD via LoveFilm.
My 2011 in Movies will return with The Fighter (2010)...