House of Mystery (1961)

Director Vernon Sewell's fourth (and final) stab at filming the play 'L'Angoisse' by Celia de Vilyars and Pierre Mills, House of Mystery (1961) definitely falls into the programmer category.  Indeed, running at under an hour, it was originally shown in the US as part of the Kraft Mystery Theatre TV series and more recently was marketed in the UK as part of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries DVD box set, (despite not being part of that series nor being based on a Wallace story).  It has to be said that Sewell showed considerable ingenuity in his reworkings of the story.  While the first two versions, The Medium (1934) and Latin Quarter (1945) were relatively straightforward adaptations of the play, retaining its background of artists and the central twist of a body concealed within a sculpture, both Ghost Ship (1952) and House of Mystery change the settings and characters quite radically, while retaining the same basic plot.  House of Mystery, as its title implies, confines the action to a single house, with the sculptor antagonist of the original play replaced by an electrical scientist, (who, naturally, has his own lab in the shed), who decides to turn the tables after his wife and her lover try to electrocute him in his bath, via a staged 'accident'.  His revenge is to trap them in the house's living room, which he has wired up so that they don't know what is 'live' and what isn't, putting them at constant risk of electrocution.  He gives them an hour to find a way to escape, after which he'll kill  them anyway.

A simple enough plot, but it takes the film, (which only runs fifty six minutes), a seeming age to get to it.  The problem is that Sewell has chosen, this time around, to wrap it in not one, but two sets of flashbacks.  The film opens with an unnamed young couple viewing a house in the country, which is being offered very cheaply.  There, they are startled by a mysterious woman, who proceeds to explain to them why the house is priced so low and why it has been empty for several years - it's reputedly haunted.  Which takes us to the first set of flashbacks in which another couple inherit the house from a distant relative, an electrical scientist whose wife had mysteriously disappeared some years ago.  Weird phenomena start to plague them, with the wife seeing a man standing by the windows in the living room, then on the TV screen, while lights switch themselves on and off and all manner of other apparent electrical faults manifest themselves.  After ruling out any faults with the house's wiring, the couple reluctantly call in a psychic investigator who, in turn, calls in a medium.  The medium then has a series of visions - which take us into our second set of flashbacks, through which the original story, at last, unfolds.  Unfortunately, not only does the narrative structure slow things down, but it also serves to confuse - it isn't always easy to keep track of who we are currently watching or when the action is taking place. Despite the three timelines apparently taking place years apart, there is no indication of this in the film itself, with the house's decor and the characters' costumes always appearing to come from 1961.

To be fair, despite an obviously tiny budget, the film is decently enough made, although somewhat slow - thanks to that tortuous narrative structure - and drab.  In these respects, it is very much of a piece with other British programmers from the era, such as the Edgar Wallace series (with which it shared its producers):  small scale, understated and very much made with limited means.  The cast contains some soon to be familiar faces, including Nanette Newman and Ronald Hines, with Colin Gordon, who gives the film's best performance as the ghost hunter, the closest thing to a 'star' name.  Sewell does attempt a final twist in the last reel, which most viewers will have seen coming a mile off - the mysterious woman telling the story is herself the ghost of the murdered wife, whose body was walled up in the house and never found.  She is the ghost haunting the property, rather than her murderous husband.