Ben and Marian Rolf (Oliver Reed, Karen Black), along with their son and Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis), move into a worn mansion for the summer. The one hitch is that an old, and never seen woman will be staying in one of the rooms. Once in the house, the family members begin to have hallucinations and dangerous compulsions.
I’m not the fan of Bette Davis that so many are, but still I think that the woman who starred in All About Eve deserved something better in the last third of her career. It’s sad that her final film was the inexcusable Wicked Stepmother, but it is equally depressing that more than ten years earlier, long before her stroke, she was marooned in dreck like this.
Looking like a TV movie with the pace of a six part miniseries, Burnt Offering is one of those films where you know everything an hour before the characters, but in this case, it’s an hour and forty-five minutes before them. The house is evil (haunted or possessed or an evil alien, it’s never explained). Yup. Kind of obvious. Once a few mysterious things happen (sooo slowly), I was ready for the end, but Burnt Offering crawls its way along, supplying all the terror of an attacking killer snail.
The cast looks far more impressive than I would expect for a C-level horror film, at least when I’m reading their names, but their performances are another matter. Overacting is the norm (when Ben sees the chauffeur from his childhood, his reaction inspires laughs, not fear), except for Black, who switches between overacting and barely acting at all.
The vampiric nature of the house is interesting enough to have made this a fine fifteen minute segment of The Night Gallery.