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The Legend of Hell House

The Legend of Hell House

List Price: $9.98
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Roddy does a excellent job solving the problem!
Review: Hell House was a strange but on the edge of your seat movie. I found myself wondering what was going to happen next. Roddy was as cute and sexy as usual and I liked the way he took care of that evil spirit. Way to go Roddy!!!!!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: a real scary movie
Review: This movie doesnt have all the new special effects, It is better than most of those films cause is has a real plot, and never lets you rest, with real suspense, excellant acting,and a great story. one of the best horror/suspense films ever made.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A haunted-house thriller with excellent cinematography.
Review: Excellent from start to finish. I first viewed this movie as a 12-year old and it left very memorable and haunting impressions with me! I picked it up recently and found that it wasn't that the movie is tremendously scary, but that it is lush with vivid imagery with a great cast of characters and an intricate and well-told plot.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A haunting and suspenseful ghost story.
Review: Although short on special effects, the story is unique. The atmosphere is amplified by the excellent backround music. Roddy McDowell's character provides the past history of Hell House to it's eerie fullest.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the best horror/supernatural films ever made
Review: This film is a classic in every sense of the word. It has every element of supernatural and even some psychological horror. It has the spooky house, and a superb cast of characters. It is extrenmely well-written, and the direction and cinematography are truly excellent.

This film marked one of the late Roddy McDowall's best screen performances, and I'm not the only one who says that. It was even mentioned by several members of the Motion Picture Academy at memorials after his death a few years ago.

If you are looking for a genuinely good fright movie, you cannot go wrong with this film. It is required for any good horror movie collection.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Low-key horror has mood to spare
Review: "The Legend of Hell House" (1973) is an odd film in many ways. Scripted by Richard Matheson from his novel 'Hell House', and produced at a time when Hammer's influence on the horror genre was about to be challenged by the new breed of horror emerging from the US and mainland Europe (spearheaded, of course, by "The Exorcist" [1973] and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" [1974]), John Hough's film employs the familiar trappings of a Gothic thriller - it's set mostly in a fog-shrouded country mansion, the "Mt. Everest of haunted houses" - but it adopts a very modern, scientific approach to its subject. Four people - two psychics (Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall), a scientist (Clive Revill) and his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt) - are hired by a wealthy invalid (Roland Culver) to spend time in the legendary Belasco Mansion looking for evidence of life after death, and their subsequent investigation sets them at odds with one another, while the house itself threatens to destroy them with increasingly violent supernatural manifestations.

Long a staple of late night TV, where it frightened generations of kids who refused to sleep with the lights off for days afterward (!), the film's potency has been somewhat diluted by the passage of time. Individual scenes are terrific: The first 'sitting', in which Franklin (deliberately cast as a nod to her appearance in "The Innocents" [1961]) becomes possessed by a former occupant of the house; the all-out supernatural assault on Revill as he sits at the dining-room table; and the unforgettable moment when Franklin pulls the covers from a writhing figure on her bed to reveal...well, I'll leave first time viewers to find out for themselves, and to wonder (as we've all done): "How'd they DO that?!!" But the film is ultimately restricted by its own good intentions: The investigation and the various ghostly phenomena are all scrupulously authentic in scientific terms, but the moody, low-key approach allows few opportunities for crowd-pleasing set-pieces. As such, there's no real plot, just a succession of incidents which seem to propel the narrative forward by accident rather than design, and the climactic pay-off is very feeble indeed. However, these same weaknesses may be perceived as strengths by those who appreciate subtlety over bombast, and while "The Legend of Hell House" may not scale the heights of genuine horror, it captures a mood which gets under your skin and refuses to budge for the duration. For all my reservations, I'd recommend it to anyone, even moreso than its overrated forerunners, "The Haunting" (1963) and the aforementioned "The Innocents".

20th Century Fox's region 1 DVD runs 93m 46s and marks the film's first widescreen outing on home video, a finely detailed anamorphic (1.85:1) transfer taken from a slightly dated-looking print. The remastered 4.0 soundtrack adds a little dimension to the electronic music score (an unsettling, tuneless dirge), but little else. Sadly, the original 2.0 mono track suffers from a distracting level of hiss and crackle and, worse still, is slightly out-of-sync during the movie's first third (check out the 'sitting' in chapter 6, especially the close-up of Franklin framed against the fire at 19:00) - the 4.0 track doesn't appear to be affected this way. The anamorphic trailer gives away a little too many of the set-pieces, but it's still a welcome addition to the package, and the disc contains English captions.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "I don't know you people. Why are you here?"
Review: A chilling haunted house movie set in the "Mt. Everest" of Haunted Houses. Roddy McDowell is a psychic who the house once tried to destroy who is back again in Belasco House to face demons, both inner and outer. 4 Ghost Hunters inhabit a haunted house and find the truth about the evil that haunts the house. Very subtle and frightening. The atmosphere in this movie is unparelled. The only weakness to the story is the reason for the haunting, which is revealed at the end. The famous black cat attack has been parodied in Scary Movie 2 (juxtaposed with homages to Raging Bull and the Matrix.)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Better than "The Haunting"
Review: Maybe it is because I have read the book and saw this before "The Haunting", but I find this the stronger movie. Sits in the unique position of being the first movie to pit science against the supernatural in a believable way.

One of the best features of the movie is the soundtrack, an eclectic mix of oboe, bass clarinet, french horn and percussion that sets the mood beautifully... Which is amusing since most every review I've seen always refers to it as an 'electronic' or 'over-synthesized' soundtrack... evidence that most people wouldn't know a contra-bass clarinet from a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle. Sorry folks, that's pure accoustic!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Pretty good haunted house! 3.5 stars
Review: The movie is good in its spooky atmosphere! However, the dialogue is weak and so is the ending.

It's still a good 70s haunted house film. Go see it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A unique ghost story
Review: "The Legend of Hell House" is one of the best and most intelligent ghost stories ever put on film. The film begins with an ominous scene featuring a dying skeptic who wants to make sure that there is life after death by sending a team of parapsychologists and psychics to an infamous haunted house to see whether the place is really beset by apparitions and spirits. From then on the film never lets go, with a hypnotic, eerie and extremely unnerving atmosphere, mesmerising dialogue about the house's history and parapsychological theories as well a prevelant sense of evil that casts its shadow over the story to a marvellous effect, while the films also ends with an amazing climax. Fans of Roddy McDowell will also see the fine actor in an atypical role which may be the underrated actor's best performance aside from the "Fright Night" films. As for the DVD, it is devoid of extras except for the trailer, but the anamorphic picture is crisp and shows director John Hough's accomplished, haunting compositions in a pristine manner.


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