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Don't go In the House (1980)

Director: Joseph Ellison

The story: A young man, following his cruel Mother's death, kidnaps women and burns them up in a sealed room.

As a young boy Donny Kohler was sadistically punished by his Mother, for the slightest wrong doing, by having his arms held over the hot stove.
Years later Donny (Dan Grimaldi, who would go on to play twins in the successful HBO series "The Sopranos") has, unsurprisingly, grown into a deeply disturbed man who is obsessed by fire.
He even works in the local industrial Incinerator, where he works with his only real friend Bobby (Robert Osth).
When his Mother (Ruth Dardick), who he has been nursing through old age, finally dies Donny loses his fragile grip on sanity and starts hearing whispering voices in his head telling him that he can now do whatever he wants.
And what Donny wants is to punish women, in the way he was punished.
So Donny builds a sealed, fireproof room, buys a fire resistant suit and a flame-thrower.
Soon, his first victim is ready…….

 

Much maligned, this early jumper on the graphic psycho films of the 80's bandwagon is a movie that is at once strongly disturbing and frustratingly weak at the same time.

This movie is perhaps best known for the first burn murder, and after finally seeing it, it's easy to understand why.
The makers pull no punches in what they show. The woman is strung up, completely naked, by a chain around her wrists in Donny's metal walled room. As she cries out Donny appears dressed in his flameproof suit and helmet. He proceeds to douse her in gasoline and casually walks over to pick up his flame-thrower. All the while the woman is screaming and begging. Donny, coldly, points the flame-thrower and she watches helplessly as the jet of flame shoots out at her.
And it's here that the viewer is taken off guard. We expect there to be edits away from her strung up body to pull off the effect of the flames hitting her, but that's not what happens. In a superbly realised special effects shot we actually see the actress engulfed in the flames as she screams and twists in agony from the chain. It's a gut punch of a scene and is about as nasty a death as, more mainstream, cinema has ever shown.
Full marks to SFX Co-ordinator Peter Kurtz

The first murder however is in fact a red herring. After this disturbing sequence the makers seem to have got cold feet and the rest of the film, the general atmosphere of madness not withstanding, goes the other way into tame off screen deaths.
This is damaging to the movie, not because we NEED to see graphic deaths, but after starting out that way to have the rest of the film pull it's punches is simply frustrating.

The cheap looking cinematography by Oliver Wood actually helps with the sleazy atmosphere and helps keep the nasty feel of the proceedings when Director Ellison seems to have fallen asleep.
This seeming loss of artistic grip is best shown in the sequence where Donny goes to buy some clothes. The idea is obviously to show how Donny has difficulty in adjusting to a life of freedom without his cruel Mother, but is staged so badly it simply comes across as a training video for shop assistants.
And this happens at a time when the movie really needs to get moving, to keep up the intensity of the first, hideous, burn murder.

We are then hit with a disco sequence, scored to a revolting 80's dance tune, that yet again shifts the viewer away from the effectively dark proceedings we were expecting.
And even when Donny loses it and sets fire to a woman's hair ('Disco Inferno' of the more painful kind) the potentially gripping sequence is let down by the almost total lack of interest shown by the rest of the people in the club. As the woman is led out, there are not even any Police or Paramedics.

The victims are also shown to be stupidly trusting. Even in the less paranoid days of the late 70's early 80's women would not so blindly go off with a complete stranger in his car and into his house. This is sloppy, simplistic writing.

It's not all-bad though. The aforementioned first murder is disturbingly memorable and packs the much needed wallop of nastiness this type of film needs, the sequences showing the charred corpses (Donny has dressed them up) sitting in a room and the slowly decomposing corpse of his Mother slumped in a chair are suitably grotesque and the very idea itself of being strung up and burnt to death keeps an effectively bleak grip over the proceedings.
The music (Disco tune aside) by Richard Einhorn is so very good and helps many sequences to become more creepy than they would otherwise seem.
Einhorn (who 3 years before had scored the Peter Cushing zombie snooze fest "Shock Waves) would later work on a couple of other 80's psycho romps including "The Prowler".

Also worth a mention are a few highly unusual dream/hallucination scenes that consist of Mother's corpse walking around freaking Donny out to a creepy beach scene where the roasted corpses of the women pull Donny down into a hole. The finale is also unusual for the time, and would seem to have been an inspiration on William Lustig and Joe Spinell or the gore drenched ending of their infamous Grindhouse classic "Maniac".

Performances are nothing special, and only Grimaldi is given any real screen time.
And he is just not good enough, for such an important, almost constantly on screen role, to keep the viewer gripped. He has his moments when he goes mad, but otherwise Donny is a deadly dull psycho. That we feel anything for him (which is hard given the terrible crimes he commits) it's simply because of his childhood abuse and not due to Grimaldi's lacklustre creation of his part.

So not a classic by any means, due to bad creative decisions and missed opportunities, but as bad as its reputation would have you believe.
Worth tracking down for, at least part of the time, the bleak, nasty goings on and some genuinely creepy atmosphere.