Chad

Kurt D

Why does the skull have an olive in its eye?

Anyway, looking forward to the discussion on this one!

JOE29

I'm planning on joining in the discussion after watching the movie tomorrow night.
Is there a book based on this movie? I think it would be interesting if there is.

Fist of Doom

The film was adopted from a novel:

JOE29

I just watched the movie. I can remember seeing this on ABC way back in the 70's.
It was an ok movie, I particularly like the first sayonce when she gets possessed by
that voice. Just another haunted house flick, but it was ok.
oh, and thanks for the book recommendation, I'll have to look it up.

One more thing- It says Widescreen on the Amazon site but it looked kind of funny to me,
it looked fullscreeen, with a lot of those cropped head shots that I noticed.
I was sitting there thinking this looks horrible in fullscreen, but it says it's not.
I don't know, maybe it just an older movie.

mdnitoil

The disc I have, and the only one I'm aware of in region 1, is widescreen non-anamorphic. Perhaps your display did some funny stretching with the image?

jmsmath

Watched this last night and thought it was pretty good. I honestly don't think I had ever heard of it until it was selected for the horror club. Good atmosphere, but not overly scary, reminded me a little of House on Haunted Hill. Great performance by Pamela Franklin. Wonder whatever happened to her? According to IMDB, she has no credits after 1981.

Larry C.

I am awaiting my rental.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I had a poster for this as a kid(different than posted here). I liked it but can't remember much about it.

Trevor

Watched this last night. After the first 10 minutes, I was thinking this had classic or personal favorite written all over it. I actually seriously contemplated pausing it, coming to this thread, and thanking the chooser for introducing me to this film that I've somehow neglected all these years.

But then the movie continued.

I rarely say this, but I think I hated it. It had a great premise, so therefore potential to be quite good, but the performances and most of the writing just seemed off, and mediocre to nonsensical to me. The scientist who I thought was supposed to be a skeptic seems to accept way too much way too easily, the group seems to just plunge into things without a plan or even asking what seemed like should be must-know questions of each other, and some of the characters antipathy towards the others wasn't logical or explained very well.

I found myself thinking 'oh come on!' much too often, and was bored by midpoint. It was sort of a chore to get through, and the ending wasn't particularly satisfying for me.

A couple ok scares I guess, and a slight sense of foreboding was evident and nice throughout.

JOE29

[QUOTE=Trevor;10070161A couple ok scares I guess, and a slight sense of foreboding was evident and nice throughout.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that's probably about what I though. I probably won't watch this again until the next horror challenge. It will sit on my shelf till then.
I was disappointed in Roddy when that lady comes on to him and he just slaps her in the face- yeah that's what i'd do. I'm afraid not.

edwardnortonfan

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't like this.

When I was a kid, we had this grainy old VHS documentary thing talking about "Haunted Hollywood" and ghost stories that were associated with the making of certain movies, and this movie was on there. My mom would never let us watch it, but I always wanted to see it because the clips shown on that documentary were so cool (I forget what "ghost" was supposedly associated with the movie though). So I was excited to finally get a chance to see it, and then like Trevor said, after the first ten minutes or so, I was bored. I honestly don't get what was so bad about this movie that my mom thought my brother and I shouldn't see it. Maybe she thought it would bore us to death.

clckworang

I actually watched this one during the last Horror Movie Challenge. I thought it was all right, and its rating reminded me just how different a PG film used to be. There's no way it would get that rating now, not that it was real extreme or anything like that.

Darkgod

I don't think its a horrible movie, but I do think it is watered down from seeing other versions of a similar story. (The Haunting, House on Haunted Hill, The Others, etc. etc.) Some parts are creepy, but most of it is just your basic haunted house movie. The shots where pretty good I thought, but it had a lot of the typical 70's cliched camera movements. Anyway 6/10

Spiderbite

My dvd is anamorphic and looked pretty good even though it appears no real restoration was done. I didn't really noticed any crazy framing that the other poster mentioned but there are several scenes where the camera does odd close-ups or angles which I suppose was meant to discomfort the audience some.

I know. I am quite late to the party on my own movie choice. I started it way back in March and got interrupted and decided to restart it for October. Anyway, this time I went in with more of a critical adult eye instead of watching it blankly as a kid and spooking myself out.

I have to admit that I agree with most of the posters here. While I still
enjoyed the picture, you definitely have to have patience with it. It does seem to drag in places and the spooky stuff really amounts to creepy whispers and the occasional overacting. I do agree that the payoff is not that great in the end but the whole movie still has great atmosphere throughout. I like that the main protagonist dies and Mrs. Tanner's possessions always creep me out. That voice is just odd.

And I do love Roddy McDowell. He does his own overacting here and there in the movie but overall he delivers an interesting character all his own.

So...my adult critical rating: ***1/2 out of *****

By the way, has anyone here read the book? I have always meant to check it out but always seem to forget to. Is it worth picking up?