The Legend of Hell House
by John Hough
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Clive Revill, Gayle Hunnicutt, Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Roland CulverDirector: John Hough
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-09-04
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of The Legend of Hell House
Movie Review: Fantastically scary haunted house chiller.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great haunted house film, I think it's one of the best I've ever seen. This film is an outstanding example of what you can achieve in a horror film without resorting to special effects trickery or blood and gore (even though I love that kind of thing). And what also makes this film so effective is it's claustrophobic atmosphere and wonderfully creepy music and sound effects. Kudos to everyone in the cast especially Roddy McDowall as Fisher, the only man to survive a previous expedition. A team consisting of a physicist, his wife, a female medium and the only survivor of the previous visit by researchers are sent to Hell House to prove that the house is really haunted and that there is life after death. Every other team has failed either by going mad or getting murdered inside the walls. These four investigators hope to enter one more time to catch a glimpse, they however might not like what they see. Based on the novel Hell House written by Richard Matheson who also wrote I Am Legend, this almost has a similar plot to The Haunting (1963), which is far more critically acclaimed but I much prefer Hell House.
The biggest complaint anyone makes about the film is the similarities to the 1963 film The Haunting. In that film and in the awful 1999 re-make, 4 people go into a haunted house to see if ghosts really do exist. In this film made in 1973, it's about 4 people who go into a house to see if ghosts really exist. Both of them based on stories from a novel, they are quite similar ideas but end up with differences by the time the credits roll. This film has a great and promising start and then gets spookier and more creepy as the film goes on, the setup was very nice and there was some tension between each of these interesting characters. The four main players are Clive Revill, Gayle Hunnicutt, Roddy McDowell and Pamela Franklin and they are all first-rate, most particularly McDowell as the somewhat eerie Mr Fisher and Pamela Franklin as the eccentric medium Florence Tanner.
The Belasco house in the film is described as "the Mount Everest of haunted houses", built by a strange, reclusive tycoon who had an Aleister Crowley-style obsession with exploring all the darker side of life, and manipulating his guests for his own amusement. There were some great and memorable scenes in this film one in particular is where Clive Revill experiences a violent haunting where he nearly gets killed by a falling chandelier and almost get burnt by the fire place, another great and spooky scene involves a dark and shadowy figure behind the shower curtain (What the hell was that!!?).
This was definitely the ultimate haunted house film, it was terrific and well worth watching, I highly recommend this.
Summary of The Legend of Hell House
In sits there, shrouded in mist and mystery, a nesting place for living evil and terror from the dead. It's Hell House. Roddy McDowall heads the cast of this exciting chiller about four psychic investigators and the dark, brooding mansion they themselves call "the Mt. Everest of haunted houses." It's already destroyed one team of researchers. Now this brave quartet ventures in for another try at unraveling its secret. But before they succeed, they must suffer through madness, murder and everything else the spirits that dwell here have in store for them. Yet learning the truth just might drive them all insane. An ingeniously-devised ghost story, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE will thrill and delight veteran horror fans from the first creaking door to the very last slithering shadow.Four people enter the Belasco Mansion, the so-called "Everest of haunted houses," hired by a dying millionaire to investigate the possibility of life after death. Physicist Clive Revill leads the quartet, which includes his wife Gayle Hunnicut and two mediums. Pamela Franklin, young and impulsive, immediately makes contact with what she perceives as a tortured spirit, while Roddy McDowall, the only survivor from the previous investigation 20 years ago, closes himself off completely, deathly afraid of the malevolent forces that crushed his former comrades in body and spirit. Science fiction and horror legend Richard Matheson, responsible for penning such horror classics as The Devil Rides Out and Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum, brings a literate sensibility and a refreshing seriousness to the haunted-house genre with this adaptation of his novel Hell House. Director John Hough follows Matheson's lead with a moody but sober approach, balancing the physical threats of objects lethally leaping to life with the slow, subtle possession of the characters by a truly evil spirit. Parts of the script feel like so much scientific mumbo jumbo, with characters discussing the finer points of supernatural manifestation and ectoplasmic activity, but Hough's deliberate direction gives it the necessary solemnity to take it all seriously. --Sean Axmaker
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