Watch House of the Damned For Free

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Boring

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"House of the Damned" starts out promising enough, following an architect and his wife who visit a California mansion with a strange history. All is fairly normal at first, but after they meet a lawyer and his wife there, events take a turn.One of the more off-the-map haunted house films of the twentieth century, "House of the Damned" is a complete oddity in just about every sense of the word. It runs an awkward hour and three minutes long, meanders without any apparent purpose for the first fifty minutes, and then nosedives into a twist that is completely out of left field. The truth be told, there really is not much happening here, which is saying something for a feature that runs about sixty minutes. In spite of the run time, the film doesn't necessarily feel that short, but the script is a bit too skeletal, and the lack of legitimate thrills makes the audience yearn for a bit more development. It is not entirely a bad film, though. For what it's worth, it's wonderfully atmospheric, and hits notes similar to "House on Haunted Hill" and Robert Wise's superior thriller "The Haunting." The first half of the film does manage to ratchet some suspense and intrigue, with the proceedings becoming increasingly inexplicable.The acting here is solid, with Merry Anders and Ron Foster playing the lead on screen couple convincingly. As I said before, the film's conclusion is unexpectedly bizarre; it works well enough I suppose, but it does certainly soften the film's overall bite, which isn't much to begin with.Overall, "House of the Damned" is a fairly uneventful, single-note horror movie that is worth a watch as a genre oddity that has more or less been forgotten. It's not remarkable by any stretch of the imagination, but it is atmospheric and has two solid scare scenes that are visually fantastic. Ultimately though, it feels more like a clever episode of "The Twilight Zone" than it does a feature film—not that that's necessarily bad, but it certainly makes one wonder where the filmmakers were coming from. 6/10.

When I started watching House of the Damned I had no expectations. That turned out to be a good thing. At the beginning it was okay but it started going downhill immediately. The dialogue was cheesy, delivered in a stiff, choppy manner that was unappealing. I didn't feel any tension during the entire film, just a feeling that the life was being sucked out of me. The antagonists of the film weren't scary, turning out to be benign people trying to preserve their home. If you are going to call a movie House of the Damned, either the house or the inhabitants should darn well be damned. I wouldn't recommend this movie for fans of horror films as they will be sorely disappointed.

"House of the Damned" is a short (barely over one hour) and definitely not-so spooky haunted house chiller from the early 60's that remains extremely slow-paced and never really reaches any atmospheric highlights. There are no famous names in the cast or crew list, so maybe if this were a Hammer or William Castle production; it might have been a bit more appealing. It's actually not even a full-blooded haunted house movie, as none of the menace ever comes out from the house. Usually in this sort of films, like for example "The Haunting", the house is introduced almost like one of the main characters, but here it's just a piece of decor. An architect and his wife are sent up to a remote house on a hill after the previous tenant mysteriously vanished without leaving a message. The owner and his attractive foreign wife come to meet the couple the next day and, for a short while, the script resembles more of a melodramatic soap opera instead of a supernatural thriller. Perhaps the "Damned" in the title refers to the poor suckers, like me, who were tricked into watching this dull nonsense and expected something good. Eventually there does appear to be something wrong with the house; namely unknown residents with hairy hands that like to steal keys. Then, suddenly and out of the blue, the architect couple also discovers that the place once was inhabited by a crazy old lady who now resides in a sanatorium. Whatever twist the screenplay attempts to bring forward, it's totally useless. The ambiance simply isn't as compelling as it should be. Nothing to recommend here. Even Disney's "The Haunted Mansion" is at least a dozen times more disturbing than this. The climax, which comes abrupt and totally random, is too insane for words and left me staring at a black screen for certainly five whole minutes after the finishing of the closing credits! What the hell was that? Was I too stoned, drunk, temporarily unconscious or did I REALLY witness this ending? It's the most nonsensical, random, unworldly, grotesque, irrelevant and deranged twist-ending ever! The Oscar for dementia inarguably goes to "House of the Damned".

"House of the Damned" is a fairly unknown little chiller from 1963 that provides some undeniably creepy moments and yet ultimately reveals itself as a marginal entertainment at best. In it, we are introduced to Scott and Nancy Campbell, a likable, attractive couple that has been hired to do an architectural survey of Rochester Castle, a deserted, San Simeon-like affair in the California mountains. But is the pile REALLY deserted? Anyway, this film offers us some surprisingly fine acting by Ronald Foster and Merry Anders as our perplexed couple, as well as interesting direction by Maury Dexter (I know, I know...who?) and some nice B&W lensing in 'Scope, well captured on the crisp-looking DVD that I just watched. There is at least a quartet of scenes that should manage to drip some ice water down most viewers' spines: a half-seen, legless creature creeping through the dark of night; the face of a strange woman peering from behind a bedroom grille; the first lumbering appearance of Richard "Jaws" Kiel; and the sight of a headless person sitting in a chair, hands aflutter. But ultimately, the picture is done in by its denouement; an overly mundane explanation for the film's previously bizarre events that some may find sweet, others ridiculous and still others laughable. This ending kind of reduces the film to the level of prosaic piffle; at least, it proved a disappointment to this viewer. Still, with a running time that just barely exceeds 60 minutes, "House of the Damned" never wears out its welcome, does hold the viewer's attention, and should even prove just fine for the kiddies. It's worth a look, I suppose.