HOUSE OF EVIL (1968/1972)

A rural community, 1900. In a field, two men find the dead body of a woman, her eyes plucked out just like another body found by a lake a few days earlier. When the police find a letter written in Urdish, the language of the Urds, a nomadic people, they think the killings are part of a personal vendetta and their focus is on a group of Urds who work as servants at nearby Morhenge Mansion. At the mansion, the elderly Matthias Morteval (Boris Karloff, at right) and his doctor, Emerick Horvath, believe the murders are just like ones that occurred in Vienna and Budapest when his family lived in those places. Matthias’s brother Hugo was plagued by a belief that everyone around him was spying on him, and he engaged in a series of murders in which he plucked out the evil eyes of others. Hugo is dead but Matthias thinks that the "evil weed" has sprung up again in another family member, so he invites all his living relatives to the house for a will reading, apparently hoping, with help from Emerick, to figure out who the killer might be. Most of them (Ivor, rich widow Cordelia, and banker Morgenstern) are considered to be greedy no-goods by Matthias, but the fourth is his young and lovely cousin Lucy, who is likable enough but whose mother died insane. She brings her handsome boyfriend Charles, a police inspector, who, as an outsider, is not allowed to spend the night in the mansion. The big dark house is creepy enough but Matthias insists on playing a spooky organ concerto which is currently unfinished. Emerick shows everyone the collection of famous automaton toys that were made by the Mortevals for rulers and aristocrats. It was rumored that the toys could be remotely controlled and could commit murder for their rich owners. One dances with Cordelia but spins out of control and can't stop dancing. Cordelia manages to get free but now the toys have a sinister aura to them. Fodor, a servant, takes Charles to stay the night in the village and on the way home, Fodor is killed, his eyes taken out. The servants suspect Charles. In the middle of the night, a grandfather clock stops ticking and next morning, Matthias is found dead. Emerick takes over hosting duties and as they all wait for the reading of the will that night, the creepy life-size toys begin killing the relatives off. Organ music and bloody prints on the keys point to the possibility that Matthias may not actually be dead. The climax is fairly rousing, complete with more killer toys, loud organ music, fire and destruction.

I quote from my review of THE SNAKE PEOPLE: this is "one of a notorious bunch of low-budget Mexican horror films that Boris Karloff filmed during the last year of his life. The films were made by a Mexican company and filmed in Mexico, but because Karloff was ailing, he apparently shot his scenes in California. But though Karloff may not have been in prime physical shape, he's still the best thing in the movie." This one has a good plotline and a nicely creepy atmosphere, but the incredibly murky prints available make it difficult to see what the hell's going on during the last half-hour of the movie, when lots of things are going on. There are odd narrative lapses here and there. At one point, a character is killed upstairs, but his blood doesn't start dripping through the floor into a downstairs room until hours later. The Urds plotline is a complete red herring, and it was unclear to me where Charles was for a good chunk of running time in the middle: in a jail? A house? Morhenge Mansion? The toys are a good distraction from some of the wordier sequences though how they're controlled is never revealed. Karloff gives it his all and is fine. The other actors are mostly competent, and Andres Garcia is good looking and charismatic as Charles, though he winds up with not a lot to do until the conclusion. The filmmakers try to build tension with an overheated score which is irritating and not effective. Having said all that, it's certainly watchable and I suspect could be considered more than that if it's ever restored to clarity. Filmed in 1968 but not released until 1972. [YouTube]