Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Movie Review: "The Legend of Hell House" (1973)

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Movie: "The Legend of Hell House"
Director: John Hough
Year: 1973
Rating: PG
Running Time: 1 hours, 35 minutes

A wealthy man (Roland Culver) offers a physicist (Clive Revill), his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), a spiritual/mental medium (Pamela Frank), and a physical medium (Roddy McDowell) a large sum of money each to rid his house of any and all paranormal presences, as well as unravel the mystery of Hell House. They are given four days before Christmas to achieve this task and must stay in the house for that period of time. While there, a lot of strange things start to happen, from objects moving, to physical manifestations of spirits in people and animals. It stops becoming a matter of solving the mystery, but rather, can they stay alive long enough to do so?

This movie is your typical haunted house horror flick. It's not overly scary (especially since it's rated PG), but it does contain a lot of pretty neat scenes and imagery. Some of the special effects are pretty good for their day and age. Overall, this movie had a cool feel to it in general.

Pamela Frank, who plays Florence, the spiritual/mental medium, had a face built for horror: her expressions conveyed such a range of emotions that you could really feel like she was scared, nervous, etc. Roddy McDowell was good in this movie as the closed-off, scared psychic. Clive Revill did well as the skeptical scientist who looks for a rational explanation in everything.

This was a pretty enjoyable horror movie, one that's good as an "ease into an entire month of horror, gore, a scariness" movie.

My Rating: 6/10
BigJ's Rating: 7/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 46%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?

Note: BigJ and I have done a horror movie marathon for the past 3 or 4 years, but are going to re-watch some of our old favorites to give a good range of horror reviews!

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