Rating: B
Dir: Georg Fenady
Star: Stella Stevens, Elsa Lanchester, Bernard Fox, Roddy McDowall
Well, this was an unexpected treat. It plays as a very droll, tongue in cheek take on the haunted house whodunnit genre, such as The Old Dark House – not that these tended to take themselves particularly seriously to begin with. But right from the start, it’s clear we are through the looking glass, because it begins with the marriage of Lord Arnold Dwellyn to his long time mistress Karen (Stevens). Nothing unusual there. Except that the aristocrat is dead, literally propped up in his coffin at the altar, as the poster below shows. Making matters even more surreal is the presence of his widow, who is none too happy about the new wedding. Not that she lives too long to complain about it (top).
Yes, people are soon dropping dead in imaginative fashions. Adding to the weirdness, is the arrival of messages from the late Lord: fortunately, his coffin comes equipped with a cassette player (!). These berate various members of the family for their inconsiderate behaviour – not least Karen, who has been cheating with his own brother, the spendthrift Robert (McDowall). Going by the rapidly-increasing body count, I wouldn’t be selling them any life insurance policies. The authorities, in the shape of Constable Henry Hooke (Fox), are baffled. The audience probably won’t be, not least because by the end, there aren’t many suspects left alive, and really only one person who hasn’t fallen foul of Lord Dwellyn at some point in the past.
It’s a glorious stream of stiff upper-lip and upper-class eccentricity, spoofing the tropes of the whodunnit. Though not all participants might be as British as they seem – Stevens most notably – it’s a very solid cast, including the Bride of Frankenstein herself in a pivotal role as Lord Dwellyn’s faithful sister, Hester. My favourite character, however, is the delightfully Welsh Constable Hooke, who almost acts as comic relief narrator. While there are times where he’s remarkably dumb, coming up with all manner of explanations for the macabre deaths, at other times his pronouncements are spot on the mark, e.g. when he muses, “Did they make it a cemetery down here because it’s always foggy, or is it always foggy down here because they made it a cemetery?”
Credit also Norman Stuart as Lord Dwellyn, who gets more screen time than any corpse I can think of, and Murray Matheson – again, not British, but Australian – who provides the vengeful voice from beyond the grave. All the characters seem to be having a fine time of it, and are clearly in on the joke, to varying degrees. The viewer should find this a good deal of morbid fun too, helped by the fact that the victims, with the exception of the mute “Indian” servant, all deserve to be punished. The death penalty might be a bit harsh, admittedly. Still, it’s got a lovely EC Comics vibe to its tale, and despite it being over fifty years old, I found this surprisingly entertaining.