Barbara
Stanwyck, Kitty Winn, Richard Egan, Michael Anderson Jr.
Sort of hard to look at objectively considering that in the 35 years since
there have literally been hundreds of movies exactly like it,
The House That Would Not Die is an amusing yet not very
stimulating watch. Barbara Stanwyck, looking oddly similar
to the Chicken Lady from the Kids in the Hall,
plays Ruth Bennett (attractive name, yes?), who moves into an old family
property in the country with her niece Sara (Kitty Winn,
whom you may have forgotten from Exorcist II), who immediately
begins overacting and doing a poor impression of someone who is possessed.
Toss in a seance, a puffy leading man (Richard Egan,
looking vaguely lost even in scenes where he isn't possessed by a ghost),
and a legitimately cute young fella (the unexpectedly yummy Michael
Anderson Jr., looking like every hipster in Williamsburg, Brooklyn),
and you've got a cast ready for ghostly happenings and fantastically unmotivated
camerawork. Yes, old master John Llewellyn Moxey is at
the helm here, and as usual he fills the piece with glorious staging and
compositions, not to mention a Final Girl who teeters on the edge of senility
(see also: The Strange and Deadly
Occurence). Boasting a few genuinely creepy and classically
chilling scenes (the moment when the cellar door swings open in front
of a stunned Anderson is particularly effective), House is simply too
predictable from the get-go, and doesn't offer enough twists or character
development to make the payoff worthwhile.
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