A small passenger plane makes an emergency landing in the middle of nowhere to avoid a storm. The passengers take refuge in a large, empty house. While romances and minor intrigues occupy some of the passengers, one is murdered. It turns out he was carrying diamonds. The security guard hired to protect the stones wants to find the killer while most of the others are more interested in dinner and the storm.
Low budget director Frank R. Strayer is at it again with another Poverty Row Old Dark House film. This one is even harder to call horror than the others, and reasonably hard to sit through. Strayer wasnāt given much to work with, and unfortunately he didnāt have the skill to stretch a buck. The sets are drab square box rooms with the camera parked on one side. The design is boring as is the cinematography. Strayer could bring a little extra to stylized horror period pieces, but the closer a story was to reality, the less he could do with it. Itās funny that he finally found his niche directing Blonde movies.
The little known actors are game, but seem to have been given little help. The many long pauses turn the whole thing to sludge, and since the dialog has no flare, I didnāt need more time to dwell on what anyone was saying.
Thereās a ghost of a good idea in the elderly woman who spends her time knitting and watching everyone else, getting involved in two romances as well as the discovery of the murderer, but it isnāt developed well enough. Perhaps if sheād been the lead, instead of just another of the thirteenā¦ But I just as easily could say, āPerhaps if the script had been betterā¦ā The ending is both silly and uninteresting, though thereās no reason for an average viewer to stick around till then.
Strayerās other Dark House films are The Monster Walks (1932),and The Ghost Walks (1934). He also directed the non-Dark House horror filmsĀ The Vampire BatĀ (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935)