The House That Dripped Blood (1970)

A four story anthology wrapped by a Scotland Yard detective’s investigation of the  disappearance of a film star who rented a house with a strange past.  The stories:

• Method for Murder—a high strung horror writer (Denholm Elliott) begins to see his latest serial killer.

• Waxworks—A man (Peter Cushing) visits a local waxworks and finds a bust that looks remarkably like a girl he once knew.

• Sweets to the Sweet—A nanny is hired to look after the daughter of a man (Christopher Lee) who is both cruel to, and frightened of, the little girl.

• The Cloak—An arrogant actor (Jon Pertwee), making a vampire movie with a beautiful co-star (Ingrid Pitt), finds that his cloak once belonged to a real vampire.

I’m both a fan and an advocate of short film.  I run the annual Dragon*Con Short Film Festival to promote the best in genre shorts.  But I understand the realities of the marketplace.  There is no money in shorts.  Anthology films are a way around that bit of reality by combining several shorts to create a feature length product that can be sold.  Unfortunately, they tend to make thin profits if any, so they are few and far between.

The House That Dripped Blood presents four short films with the biggest names in horror, for 1970 anyway.  Unfortunately, the selection is uninspired.  I’ve often said that a short film should have one idea (as opposed to a feature which should say more), but several of these tales have none.

Method for Murder and Waxworks have no supernatural elements at all.  Both are standard and very predictable thrillers.  Elliott is passable as a novelist losing his mind, but I would have liked to see him lose it in a more original way.  Cushing does his best, but is given hardly a character and no plot.  Robert Bloch (Psycho) is credited as the writer of the entire film, but rumor has it that Waxworks came from a different pen.  That’s easy to believe as I expect more from Bloch.

Sweets to the Sweet picks things up a bit.  While far from original, if any segment is going to evoke a chill, it is this one.  Lee plays the same stern, intense character he’s played in multiple films, and manages to be less sympathetic than when he’s a full fiend from Hell.  The child is unsettling and a source of evil, just like most children.

How you’ll feel about the fourth segment depends on how you felt about the other three.  Those who thought they included actual frights will be disappointed by The Cloak.  I found nothing unnerving in The House That Dripped Blood (well, except for the presence of a child…), so the last segment was more to my liking.  It drops all pretence of being horror and goes for comedy.  Pertwee, best known as the third Doctor in the long running Doctor Who series, plays a dandified horror actor with a wink and a nod to the audience.  He even gets a jab in against Lee, commenting on what a good film Dracula is: “The one with Bela Lugosi, not the new fellow.”  Ingrid Pitt (who became famous for her Hammer Horror vampires, as well as for a supporting role, with Lee, in the thoughtful The Wickerman) essentially plays herself, with cleavage and a smile.  It’s all for fun and works as light entertainment.

For a film titled The House That Dripped Blood, you might expect some dripping blood, or at least some evil from the house.  But the house isn’t much of a branching item for the stories, as bad location is about as evil as it gets.