House of the Living Dead (1973)

Every so often I come across a film which has fallen into such obscurity that even I haven't heard of it.  Such was the case with Anglo-South African horror film House of the Living Dead (1973), which I recently caught up with.  Yet, despite having never seen or heard of it, the whole thing had an air of familiarity about it, reminding me, at every turn, of other low budget shockers I'd seen.  The whole business of a young woman arriving at a remote country house and finding her fiancé/husband undergoing personality changes and being suspected of various heinous crimes, along with the mad lookalike relative hidden in the attic, seems to have come straight from The Black Torment (1964), for instance.  The antagonist's experiments in capturing souls, meanwhile, is highly reminiscent of 1972' The Asphyx, while the whole voodoo-on-the-plantation business recalls I Walked With a Zombie (1943).  Despite the film's title, however, there are no zombies present, with the whole voodoo angle being a piece of misdirection, for the horrors turn out to be of the strictly pseudo-scientific kind.  The real culprit is the mad twin brother, a reclusive doctor who lurks in the attic carrying out weird experiments on the local animal population, having found a way to extract their souls and store them in large jars.  There's an equally dotty mother who opposes her other (non-mad) son's marriage to his fiancée, who is about to arrive from England, as she doesn't want to risk the insanity which runs in the family being perpetuated into another generation.  Another complication arises when an English doctor who knew the mad twin at medical college arrives at the same time as the fiancée, planning to stay with some old friends at the neighbouring farm.

All manner of mayhem ensues, with brutal murders on the plantation, at first attributed to an escaped horse, a mysterious hooded figure lurking around the countryside and an increasingly frantic fiancée trying to fathom her husband-to-be's strange behaviour, clashing with his mother and attempting to find out what's going on in the attic.  In a frenzied climax, it is revealed that, sometime before the fiancée arrived, the mad brother had murdered his twin and swapped places with him, planning to extract the girl's soul and unite it with his brother's, which he is keeping in a glowing blue jar.  Inevitably, all those glowing jars get smashed when the visiting doctor turns up with the police and the evil twin finds himself attacked by all those souls, both human and animal, he had extracted.  Cue the lead actor staggering around screaming as ghostly animal noises play on the soundtrack and coloured lights play over his face, before he falls over the banister to his death, (landing next to his dead mother who had previously tossed over that same banister).  The film ends with the girl in the visiting doctor's arms - which seems a bit creepy as he's old enough to be her father.   House of the Living Dead is an entirely derivative film, with every element feeling as if it had been borrowed from another, better, film. Even the cast, headed by Shirley Ann Field, has a hand-me-down feel, with the leads all being vaguely familiar for half-remembered TV roles.  (Still, lead actor Mark Burns did win a Best Actor prize at the 1974 Stiges Film Festival, so somebody must have liked his over-the-top, scenery chewing, performance in his dual roles).   It's all directed smoothly but blandly by Ray Austin, best known for the hundreds of TV episodes he directed, first in the UK, then the US and sexploitation films like Virgin Witch (1972).  The only thing that makes the film stand out are its South African locations, which add a certain degree of sweaty exoticism to an otherwise overly familiar scenario.

(Despite never having heard of the film under the House of the Living Dead title, I later found out that it had originally been released in the UK under the title Doctor Maniac, which I vaguely recall having been referred to, in dismissive terms, in, I think, one of Alan Frank's books on horror movies.  But I hadn't seen it, even under that title).