House Of The Long Shadows
ON PAPER, director Pete Walker's defiantly old fashioned whodunit that was originally released in 1983 and is issued on DVD and Blu-ray by Fabulous Films on March 28 March should be a highly desirable piece of cult friendly real estate. In reality, though, House Of The Long Shadows is a creaking old wreck unworthy of housing the horror legends it boasts on its poster.
Predictably, it's all set in a deserted mansion where a wise-cracking young author comes seeking inspiration when he takes on a wager to write the ultimate spooky in just 24 hours. He's not, surprise surprise, the only person in the house – and not the only guest with a vested interest in the building's future.
Michael Armstrong based his screenplay on Earl Derr Biggers' 1913 novel Seven Keys To Baldpate, a tome that has inspired many a 'house as the star' fear fest down the years, and Walker clearly wanted to return horror to that more genteel era. It doubtless felt outdated to cinema audiences in 1983 and it feels positively archaic today, coming across as stiffer than an antique cellar door and every bit as creaky.
That remarkable cast list – bringing together genre greats Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and John Carradine for the very first time ever – remains its biggest selling point, but despite the heavy hitters fronting it, House Of The Long Shadows should have been condemned long before it made it to the screen.
The problem lies not with that stellar cast – Price, Cushing, Lee and to a lesser extent Carradine could rescue just about any substandard horror movie they graced, after all – but instead in Walker's direction and choice of approach.
What could have been a sparky, witty celebration of classic horror story traditions winds up instead a dull and cliche-heavy exercise in ghost train hokum that lacks both tension and anything approaching a scare, even a gentle and non-threatening one as you might expect from the names involved.
Somehow, the interplay between the leads fails to spark even sporadically despite Price, Cushing and Lee being great pals in real life. It was the only time those much beloved faces of fantasy cinema shared screen time and the result is a huge disappointment.
Walker's past in gory but undeniably effective grind house groundbreakers from the 70s like Frightmare and House Of Whipcord and cheap sexploitation efforts such as Cool It Carol mean he'll have a seat at the top table of British cult film makers forever, but he's much less effective in the more traditional world he finds himself in here.
He does bring a little B-movie bravado to proceedings by finding a role for the great Sheila Keith, who graced most of those aforementioned shockers from the previous decade, and Fabulous Films have unearthed a pristine print for this reissue – but even that can't save this particular bleak house from the wrecking ball.
Walker never made another film after this, moving instead into property development, would you believe, and the stars never aligned together on screen again. Perhaps that's the biggest shame of all.
