House of the Dead (1978)

A salesman finds himself at the doorstep of a funeral parlor as the rain comes pouring down. The mortician requests kindly for the salesman to stay awhile and listening to some stories regarding his clients, particularly with how they wound up in his establishment.

**½ / *****



Anthologies are indeed a dime a dozen, but Amicus made its fair share, and almost all of them have at least one tale worth sitting through the whole omnibus for. I think that is often the case for any number of Horror anthologies that came after Amicus. Even something like The Uncanny (1977), Terror Tract (2000), or Night Train to Terror (1985) offer something from one of their tales inside the frameworks to glean from them. I think House of the Dead (1978) is the same way.

A lot of movies have made the public domain seemingly forgotten after a release. Lots of 70s and 80s films received the benefits of re-evaluation on VHS in movie rental stores, and later once the internet gave many of us access to them via youtube, DVD release, and other “avenues” once again worked as a vehicle for the chance to resurface. There is an insatiable curiosity for the oddities of the past long (and not so long) distant. So to see House of the Dead (I prefer this to the stranger title, Alien Zone) available in a public domain pack of movies (or surfacing on youtube among other places), it is an anthology that I reckon will maintain an intrigue for aficionados looking for the potential treasures deep in the chest, available but not exactly crying aloud for discovery.

For me, the tales are a mixed bag of mediocre to almost great. I think the first tale has no real significance in its story but has a rather creepy vibe and intense conclusion. A school teacher who hates children (that in and of itself is an ironic howler) receives a visit by children wearing Halloween masks hiding pale faces and oddly-formed mouths of shark-like teeth. Are they vampires? The screen takes on unusual color and a distorted view seemingly warping the gradual surrounding of the teacher by the kids as they draw closer and eventually trap her in her kitchen with no place left to escape. I think the kids under Halloween masks emerging in the teacher’s home is the highlight of the tale, preferably because it works off the home invasion angle not as recognizable in 1978 as it would much later when the likes of The Strangers or even Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer featured the theme and gave it unsettling relevance. That the kids are ghouls and the director decided to visually distort how we view their approach towards the victim in her own home (no safety in the confines of what is supposed to be a place of refuge, a place of security that proves to be anything but).

John Ericson has the kind of face so suitable to the role of an eerie mortician leading the way to each story and wrapping things up with that knowing expression of “you’re in deep shit and there’s nowhere to go from here” a lot of these anthologies include. Ralph Richardson and the towering voice of doom does this in Tales from the Crypt (1972) or Burges Meredith and his “devilish” presence offering an “eye into the future” in Torture Garden (1967) where the figures who lead the viewer and certain characters featured in an anthology into tales of madness, terror, or unpredictable situations with results that typically bookend fates decided by horrible actions and/or despicable personalities. House of the Dead is no different. As the second tale will attest.

A psychopath who murders young women believing he is a blind date worth taking a chance on has a set up camera recording him strangling them. He speaks into the camera, fully culpable in what he plans to do. The first victim is a bubbly, agreeable, chatty sort who has no clue she’s about to be choked with her own stocking believing her date is in preparing a magic trick for her (???), while he anticipates the thrill of doing so. The second isn’t having it: she knows something’s wrong but cannot free herself from him. I don’t know if this is the victim of the scissors but for me, the second tale feels incomplete. It is a POV artifact, the first of its kind. It follows the snuff film archetype. The killer is immediately grumpy and intimidating which begged to question why the first victim would tolerate his rather obtrusive attitude. The second victim sees that he’s got this camera and perhaps is a creep, letting him know how she feels about this realization that he likes to record “action” in the home. Eventually he is being led away in handcuffs with bulbs going off from cameras recording his guilty face recognizing he’s shit outta luck.

I was reading the other day that this is actually longer than the version I watched by maybe twenty minutes which surprised me. Maybe the second tale was trimmed. I don’t know what it was but this felt so odd in its finality. It kind of abruptly concludes and simply felt absent some footage, missing some material. At any rate, while I didn’t feel it was altogether successful, the POV approach was unsettling in that the killer seems particularly gratified by his actions. He has that rather unthreatening face, too, which only added to the horror of the situation if the execution is tame. This isn’t “Naked Massacre” (1976) by any stretch of the imagination.

The third tale is by many who has seen this including me seems to be considered the best in the anthology. Essentially Charles Aidman (of Twilight Zone 60s/80s fame) is considered to be America’s greatest detective, his fame recognized by Scotland Yard’s finest, played by Bernard Lee (I know him from a childhood favorite, the Knotts/Conway detective comedy, Private Eyes (1980)). The third tale opens with Aidman in a grubby apartment lending his deductive skills to what appeared to be a suicidal hanging. Aidman goes through why he collected evidence from the arm shirt sleeve and studied the body as he does, firmly establishing that this wasn’t a suicide at all but a murder, even revealing who murdered the unfortunate guy. Lee and Aidman develop a competitive animosity. A letter of threat Aidman receives (magazine alphabet article cutouts glued to form a sentence telling Aidman he must solve a clue or else violence was in store at some point) forces him into action as Lee tags along. The twist, where ego and vanity emerge to cause irreparable damage, is fitting considering the characters involved, and the leads are exceptional in providing fun personalities with witty retort and playful insult jabs that define the thrill of the competitive spirit that drives their genius. Being the very best drives both of them to extraordinary lengths, with no real winner…

I think this anthology almost feels similarly to Night Train of Terror in that short films seem squeezed into a collection although they each appear (well some of them) to deserve a format on their own. I mention this because the third tale (although, it does seem appropriate in its length as is) is so fun to me, I almost which it were longer and separate from House of the Dead. 

The fourth and final tale (besides the framework lynchpin) has a rather miserly misanthropic businessman leaving work momentarily, encountering a bum he shoos away, finding himself in a building with trap doors, putting him through a series of dangerous, near-fatal developments (an elevator nearly crushes him, he falls down an elevator shaft, he is nearly impaled by a wall of spikes, etc) seemingly to prove a point: he has taken life for granted and is being awakened by death presenting itself. His boozing away while trapped in a room, only to be let out after undermined by a drunken stupor, encountering a similar businessman on a street shorting afterward who tells him to get away (calling him a bum) does kind of teach the guy a lesson. That we are told he dies an alcoholic is rather disconcerting considering he might have taken this experience and updated his view on life after it...

The adulterous plumbing salesman who is left by a taxi on a street near a funeral parlor instead of his hotel after sex with another woman other than his wife follows the theme of "guilty folks getting what they deserve as karma greets them unwelcomely". The mortician leads the salesman on, showing him the victims of each tale after his work on them (the door open on the casket and the reactions of the salesman are how we judge the afterward results of the deaths of each lead character), with the framework eventually getting to the final fate we are expecting: what happens to the salesman as well. The salesman tries to avoid his fate, but he just can't outrun the reaper. The mortician knows this all too well. He will be granted access to the next body meant to show up in a coffin in his funeral parlor. Someone else perhaps will be given a story about how the salesman wound up in his funeral parlor...

Although the picture quality is murky and the budget is so low, the anthology isn't a waste of time. In fact, if you wind up curiously popping it in the DVD player or coming across it on youtube, House of the Dead might just emerge far better than first thought.