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The House in Nightmare Park [1973] At some point in any comedian's film career, he has to wind up in an old dark house with a collection of eccentric and murderous relatives all out to contest the will, find the family treasure and put each other to death. This was Frankie Howerd's stab at the story, produced during his brief run as a big screen star - on the strength of the so-called 'Up' trilogy: Up Pompeii [1971], Up the Chastity Belt [1971] and Up the Front [1972] - with a script from TV genre specialists Terry Nation ['The Daleks', The Survivors, Blake's Seven] and Clive Exton [Conceptions of Murder, A Ghost Story for Christmas: Stigma, Dick Barton - Special Agent, Wolf to the Slaughter, Shake Hands Forever] tailored to his 'ooh no, look now, listen' style of patter. 'Astonishing,' blurts a supporting character here, 'he is as stupid as he looks!' Exton and Nation are also credited as producers and their selection of Peter Sykes as director and the casting of Welsh-born Hollywood star Ray Milland as the chief heavy suggests that they had ambitions for the project beyond the domestic comedy market. Indeed, Howerd's delivery is toned down to suit the ominous mood, with his frame-breaking trademark asides to the audience ['I've played to empty houses before, but ... gorblimey!'] played as self-involved mutterings rather than shouted to the back stalls. In the Up films, which spun off from his success in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on stage and the salacious Up Pompeii TV sit-com, Howerd essentially does his own act while the plot gets on with itself in the background, but here he actually plays a role, albeit one written to order. It's a wryly amusing film rather than a hysterically funny one, with a sickly yellowish atmosphere that damps the hilarity but gives it a distinctive feel. Oddly, it's among the less comical of comedy-thrillers, with Anglo-Indian furniture that is reminiscent of Conan Doyle ['The Speckled Band'] and prefigures The Ghoul. It is certainly a far more effective old dark house comedy horror movie than House of the Long Shadows. We first see ham actor Foster Twelvetrees [Howerd], 'the Greatest Master of the Spoken Word', delivering extracts from Dickens to a tiny audience some time in the late 19th Century. He is approached by the genial but obviously sinister Stewart Henderson [Milland] and engaged for a recital at the stately home Henderson shares with a bed-ridden elder brother Victor, who controls the family fortune, and his sinisterly silent sister Jessica [Crutchley], not to mention a veiled mad mother [Aimee Delamain] and a turbanned Indian butler, Patel [John Bennett]. Soon, the rest of the family shows up - more brothers, the blustering old soldier Reginald [Hugh Burden] and the unctuous medical man Ernest [Kenneth Griffith], with Reginald's sweet daughter Verity [Elizabeth MacLennan] and Ernest's gorgon-like wife Agnes [Ruth Dunning]. It develops that Victor has died and left the fortune, which includes a stash of diamonds hidden somewhere on the grounds, to his unacknowledged son, Foster. Stewart has used a dummy to convince people that Victor was still alive. No sooner is the situation made known that the relatives start getting killed off as they search for the diamonds. In a genre that almost prides itself on being derivative, and which has been parodically intended since the likes of Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Cat and the Canary made their Broadway debuts in the teens and 20s, The House in Nightmare Park makes little effort at originality in plot. Those concealed diamonds are from The Cat and the Canary, the mad or dying relatives in the attic are from The Old Dark House, the 'surprise' identity of the chief murderess is from the remake of The Old Dark House, and other bits and pieces echo The Ghoul, Oh Mr Porter!, What a Carve-Up!, etc. However, Nation and Exton take a bit more care than was really necessary with the inhabitants of Nightmare Park - the Henderson Family were long resident in India, and used to be a theatrical act - and Howerd is decent enough to let an excellent supporting cast upstage even him. Often, Howerd takes the straight line and lets someone else get the laugh, as when he swills a drink and muses 'do I detect a touch of the grape in this?' only to be told bluntly 'yes, it's wine' or is discovered during a botched Dickens reading crouched over an unconscious Verity and claims 'I was just giving her my Little Nell' only for Burden to rumble 'filthy swine!' Twelvetrees is the usual vainglorious middle-aged idiot, a supposedly
great actor who doesn't recognise a misquotation from Othello and regards
himself in the mirror with 'hmmn, not bad for thirty-two', but emerges
[like Bob Hope in The
Cat and the Canary] as a credible normality figure when set beside
plausible schemer Milland, who worships Kali and claims 'my family are
converts to the Hindu faith'; martinet Burden, whose irascible grumbles
and constant sneer of 'swine!' get funnier with repetition [told Twelvetrees
is an entertainer, he snaps 'where's his hurdy-gurdy?']; vet Griffith,
who elevates subservient cringing and grinning malice to an art form
while brandishing a huge syringe of poison; and house-keeper Crutchley,
whose tongue pokes out like a snake's as she feeds rabbits to her hothouse
reptiles. Though the horror comic touches consist mostly of the expected
knockabout with meat-cleavers and poisonous snakes, there are one or
two genuinely inspired moments. The creepiest sequence has the Hendersons
repay Twelvetrees for his recital by doing the act they used to do as
children: dressing up as face-painted 'human marionettes' and performing
a unsettling, jerky dance routine while Crutchley, who can sing but
not speak, screeches an oddly memorable 'When the Dolls Dance'. Also
surprisingly unnerving is the punchline, when Howerd throws away the
precise directions but discovers that the diamonds are 'buried in the
meadow at the front of the house' and begins to dig up the lawn as the
distorted image pulls back to reveal the huge acreage he will have to
till. First Published In: Ten Years of Terror Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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