Return of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 24 - The House on Haunted Hill

Ooohhh boy is this a cheese fest  - really spooky mansion where lots of folks have been killed, Vincent Price hamming it all up – Ghost , Skeletons and a group of people who are challenged to stay the night for $10,000 (worth about $80,000 today – where do I sign up?).

It’s profoundly silly film but it’s fun – there are some scares – the creepy old lady that appears out of nowhere in the wine cellar scaring the female lead half to death  is the best one – but there is an almost Victorian melodrama creakiness to the story that to be honest adds to its charm.

Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who has asked some people to a party being held by his wife. He and his wife obviously loathe each other, we are told that Vincent has had several other wives and they all died suddenly so it’s not looking good for the current  Wife who is  #4 .

The guests arrive, a test pilot, the female lead (who is the only one in her family that works so they could really use the money) a columnist who has bit of drinking problem and has bad luck when she picks the ponies, a psychiatrist, and the owner of the haunted house – played by Elisha Cooke who is staying for reasons I can’t understand – he has stayed one night earlier and had been found almost dead in the morning – the rest of the party were dead and some were missing heads. (it’s that kind of place)

At any rate, they all come into the drawing room, Vincent goes over the rules of the contest, E and the columnist head for the bar – E starts to tell them how doomed they all are – (he will repeat that a lot as the night goes on) them once the group is spooked and drunk they go on a tour of the house including the wine cellar with the pit full of flesh eating acid. 

Well it’s a fixer upper that’s for sure. Possibly beyond even the ability of the Home depot to fix however.

The test pilot – Lance - played by Richard Long starts to put the moves on the female lead – Lance by the way is amazing ineffectual in this film – he gets knocked out, he vanishes or a while and is later locked in a closet – this is a test pilot? Someone with the right stuff? I wouldn’t let him test string cheese. I’d be afraid he choke.

Meantime the female lead ends up seeing the floating creepy woman more than once and also ends up finding one of the missing heads – much to her displeasure – and as the trope for these films the head is gone when she gets back with the rest. “pure hysteria” states the shrink who must be a Freudian as he is smug as hell and says Hysteria a lot.

Then we find wife number 4 hanging from rope and looking dead like.  At first it looks like suicide but later the shrink points out that it couldn’t be as there was no place for wife 4 to jump off of.

So it was murder.

Well not really but it turns out that a) the Shrink and Wife #4 who is not dead – are plotting to kill Vincent Price by driving the female lead out of her mind with fear so she will ‘accidently’ shoot Vincent.

This happens – so it seems in the basement – female lead dashes off in hysterics while shrink starts to tote Vincent’s body to the acid pit (why? There isn’t any reason to do that really) the lights go out we hear the sounds of a struggle and hear a splash.

Wife #4 comes into basement to check things out – nobody is around then the lights go out and then a skeleton with Vincent Price’s voice emerges from the vat – Wife #4 of course freaks and ends up falling into said acid vat.

We then see that it was a Skelton puppet (well  we really could tell that all the time) and that Vincent is very not dead.

“I loaded blanks in the female lead’s gun “ he explains showing a hell of a lot of trust in her not switching weapons at some point.  “I’m really to face justice” which if I was his defense lawyer I ‘d be thinking about pleading insanity –‘so when you realized your wife was planning to kill you, you started building a skeleton puppet. Right.”

Anyway still a fun movie to watch – even with the plot holes and the campy effects. Vincent is great fun to watch here.

William Castle the producer loved gimmicks – in this one for the first run at least he had it set so a skeleton on a string would run down from the back of the theater to the front. It really didn’t take much to spook people in the 50’s I guess. It was as nervous decade.

Enjoy with something non-alcoholic the folks in the movie are drinking enough for everybody