Made the same year as the director's camp classic "The Horror of Party Beach," this is better made, I suppose, but far less enjoyable. It's a period proto-slasher horror about the heirs of a detested patriarch getting killed off one by one--presumably by his vengeful ghost, or so they think--after ignoring his last wishes, which were all about fear of being buried alive.
With a plot like that, this should be exciting, but it's so tamely done, in such a straightforward style, it's like a prolonged mediocre episode of Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, or some other broadcast omnibus of the early 60s. There's just no atmospherics, tension, urgent pacing, or anything else but a rather bland slickness that kind of works against what they might have achieved with this story on a low budget. The movie doesn't really seem to be taking itself very seriously, without actually having any satirical edge, so it comes off as a mild murder mystery a la Agatha Christie rather than the horror thriller its plot seems to require.
The actors are OK, if not very appealing (but then none of them are meant to be sympathetic), with one's interest naturally most galvanized by young Roy Scheider, who plays the dissolute younger son. He has a little more fun with his part than the others, gives a confident performance, and gets a burst of histrionics at the climax. But no one here rises above the material such that you think even of him, "That guy will be a star some day!"
For a much more eccentric and interesting take on a similar story, in similar low-budget independent production circumstances that manage more stylistic flavor, see the more recent "A Chronicle of Corpses."
With a plot like that, this should be exciting, but it's so tamely done, in such a straightforward style, it's like a prolonged mediocre episode of Alfred Hitchcock's TV show, or some other broadcast omnibus of the early 60s. There's just no atmospherics, tension, urgent pacing, or anything else but a rather bland slickness that kind of works against what they might have achieved with this story on a low budget. The movie doesn't really seem to be taking itself very seriously, without actually having any satirical edge, so it comes off as a mild murder mystery a la Agatha Christie rather than the horror thriller its plot seems to require.
The actors are OK, if not very appealing (but then none of them are meant to be sympathetic), with one's interest naturally most galvanized by young Roy Scheider, who plays the dissolute younger son. He has a little more fun with his part than the others, gives a confident performance, and gets a burst of histrionics at the climax. But no one here rises above the material such that you think even of him, "That guy will be a star some day!"
For a much more eccentric and interesting take on a similar story, in similar low-budget independent production circumstances that manage more stylistic flavor, see the more recent "A Chronicle of Corpses."