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The Evil

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Kandungan disediakan oleh Todd Kuhns and Craig Higgins. Semua kandungan podcast termasuk episod, grafik dan perihalan podcast dimuat naik dan disediakan terus oleh Todd Kuhns and Craig Higgins atau rakan kongsi platform podcast mereka. Jika anda percaya seseorang menggunakan karya berhak cipta anda tanpa kebenaran anda, anda boleh mengikuti proses yang digariskan di sini https://ms.player.fm/legal.
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A typical haunted-house story gets a Satanic twist in this lackluster 70’s entry that almost feels like a goofy made-for-TV movie. So naturally, although we were hoping for much better, we had a blast picking it apart and groaning.

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The Evil (1978)

Episode 396, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I am Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: This week, well, I just kind of dug into our pile of movies. You know, back when we started this podcast a little while ago. What has it been now, eight years? At least, I think. Yeah, eight or nine. We might be in our ninth or tenth year, I’m not sure.

Craig: I think we started in 2015, like late 2015.

Todd: Yeah, we did. Time flies, and not long after we started, I moved to China. You might remember, although I’m not even sure if you still have it anymore, Craig, before I left for China, knowing that we were going to be apart, but still going to continue the podcast, I loaded up a hard drive full of movies.

That I knew that I was going to want to do eventually some movies that were hard to find and, and all that. And I made a copy of it for Craig as well, so that he would have those thinking that we would kind of plow through these and we haven’t dipped into that too much. A lot of movies that we, that were on that hard drive, I still want to get to.

A lot of them were some things that I’d either seen when I was younger. Or, I had seen them on the video store shelves, but always wanted to do them, but didn’t. And this was one of those. And because I’ve been really, really busy this summer, really, with my son visiting me here in China, I just didn’t have time this week to pick a movie, and it was my turn to pick a movie.

So, kind of at the last minute, I pulled that hard drive out, I looked through it, and I just almost picked a movie at random. And I sent that to Craig and said, let’s just do this this week. The movie I picked is 1978’s The Evil. A haunted house movie and I’m always down for a good haunted house movie and this movie I remember seeing on the video store shelves when I was perusing the horror sections on those Friday nights when I was in high school looking for a horror movie to do.

Never really watched it until now and that is my history with it. Craig, how about you? Had you heard of this movie or even seen it before?

Craig: No, I had never heard of it. And it was actually kind of just typing it into Google or even into IMDB. Like it didn’t pop right up. Like you had to scroll, like it would bring up a lot of other titles with evil in the title.

There’s a lot of them. Yeah. Before you even got to the evil. So no, and I wasn’t familiar with it at all. I do still have that hard drive. I haven’t tried to use it in forever. It’s been so long. I don’t even know if it’s compatible. With my computer. TV. It’s just funny. It also, it also speaks to how long we’ve been doing this because it seems kind of quaint now that you.

Felt it necessary to put all of those movies on a hard drive, which I always appreciated and still appreciate, but since that time Nearly everything we do is widely available, you know, online. Thank God

Todd: Tubi TV Between Tubi, which seems to have most of the esoteric things we want. Yeah, and then Shudder, you know, which We might as well be shilling for, yeah, you can almost find anything.

Craig: Honestly, at this point I’m, and again, we’re not getting paid for any of this, but I’m more likely to shill for Tubi. They have an extensive, extensive horror catalog. Um, and it’s free. It’s awesome. I mean, yeah, you have to watch ads, but they have figured out their model. I, they are outperforming the other premium streaming services.

And they’re, they’re marketing on that, like, we have so many more viewers than Netflix or Hulu or any of these others.

Todd: Wow.

Craig: Yeah, they’re, they’re kind of my go to. It’s pretty great. And this is the kind of movie that’s on there. Yeah, it is. You can find some, I mean, you’ll, you’ll find a lot of garbage on there too, but there’s, uh, a lot of really cool stuff.

Now, I don’t know which category I would put this into. I certainly wouldn’t put it into the garbage category. No. I have seen far, far, far, far worse. But I didn’t love it either.

Todd: Yeah, I know what you mean. I didn’t love it. Maybe for its time, it was probably, it got decent reviews for its time. Yeah. You know, released in theaters, did fairly well.

And it comes at kind of an interesting time in history. This is 1978, right? And I was just watching this and I was thinking, oh yeah, this, this really falls into, Burnt Offerings came out in 76. So, you know, two years before this, the year before this, we had the Sentinel and even Hausu over in Japan. I mean, this has the flavor of those plus Amityville Horror, which came out in 79.

I mean, it just seems like this comes square in the middle. Of a whole bunch of movies that, you know, in the late seventies that were all. About either haunted houses were possession or some combination of the two. And there’s a lot of crossover here with the cast and with the director, the director, interestingly enough, his name is Gus Triconis.

And if you go to his IMDB page, you’re going to see that he has directed a 48. Things. He was also an actor, probably most famous for being Indio. In the West Side Story, the 1961 West Side Story. But most of his career, he was directing. And what he had been directing was mostly cheap, indie, drive in or grindhouse stuff.

He was originally kind of well known for doing that. So, I mean, if you go and look through here, we’re talking about Five the Hard Way, Supercock, The Swinging Barmaids. Nashville girl, the student body, she’s dressed to kill, you know, all these kinds of like, you can just tell from the titles, sensational, low budget, but highly respected for doing these kinds of things.

And he did a ton of TV, particularly after this movie, he seemed to pretty much just direct episodes of TV shows or tons. Of tv movies and so you remember that beauty and the beast tv series in the 80s with lynda hamilton Yeah with lynda hamilton that one always fascinated me. He directed 12 episodes of that quantum leap the commish Oh, I loved quantum leap, right?

He did 22 episodes of baywatch. So the director is uh, you know, pretty decent Interesting conversion here and this is a total coincidence We just did a minisode for our patrons, and Craig picked it, he, we did it over the Twilight Zone 1980s revival of that series, and you picked a particular episode called Grandma, and the Twilight Zone episodes there were, were bunched into three, so like one, um, I, I guess I would say episode would be like three stories in there.

And the Grandma episode was bundled with two other stories. One of those stories was called Cold Reading. And guess who directed it?

Craig: That’s funny. I was, I was all prepared for you to say, and guess who directed grandma. Gus Triconis and that was going to blow my mind. I know, right? That was, that was going to blow my mind, but still an interesting coincidence.

I I’m not super proud to say it, but I’m not ashamed of it either. Like I’m big time into like celebrity gossip. And so, and so one of the things that was most interesting to me about Gus Triconis was that before he found any success in the industry, he married and also completely green Goldie Hawn. Yeah.

When they were, when they were both. They got married very, very young and then she got laughing and just her star was rising at an incredible, incredible rate. And she wanted to start having kids right away. but he thought she was too flighty and so they ended up getting a divorce. In the divorce settlement, he demanded 75, 000 from her and out at first she was outraged and I read, I don’t know if this was an interview or something, but you know, it was like his perspective.

He said, you know, here she was on the verge of making millions and I literally had 125 to my name. So apparently, Eventually, after giving it some thought, she relented and gave him his 75, 000. And he said that they, you know, because then they both went on to be successful. I mean, she became an enormous star, still is a huge star, a legend.

Right. And, you know, he was very successful himself and in the same industry. So he said their, their paths crossed from time to time and they were always Friendly, and he was very happy for her success. So, you know, it all ended okay, but it has nothing to do with this movie. No, I’m fascinated by

Todd: Hollywood stories.

Oh yeah, of course. That’s great. Well, another interesting thing, you know, we’ve done a lot of movies on this podcast. One that we did that was also in the same realm. It was when I decided we’re going to do like slashers from 1981, this very odd category. David Sheldon, the Ri, one of the writers of this credited, he produced just before dawn and then went on to produce what for its time in 1976.

I’m sorry, this was before, just before Dawn, but in 1976, he produced and, uh, wrote to this film called Grizzly, which was this phenomenal, a low budget success. It was one of these movies that, for its time in 1976. Like was the indie breakout, you know, sort of the Blair Witch Project of its time. It cost almost, it cost very little to make, but then, uh, became world famous and grossed like 52 times the cost of its production.

And then that went on to spawn, uh, several others. The sequels. And, uh, shortly after he did Grizzly two years later, he was executive producer of the Manateau. Oh! One of our all time favorites. One of

Craig: my favorite movies that we’ve ever

Todd: done. Oh, God. It’s

Craig: fantastic. If

Todd: you haven’t heard our Manateau episode, oh, Jesus, go back and listen to it.

I

Craig: think it’s one of our best. It’s one of my all time

Todd: favorites. Uh. One of the other writers in here, Galen Thompson, worked a bit with Steven Spielberg with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 1941 all that’s of course after this one of my favorite Roger Corman movies called battle beyond the stars He did 1980 just a couple years after this So, um, yeah, and that’s not even getting into the actors, which I’m sure we’ll talk about as we go through it So, I mean, you know, this movie’s got a unique spot, I think in the Just the genre itself of these sort of haunted house movies and possession movies kind of coming out around this time.

And then it’s got this really interesting intersection of characters who are involved in writing it, producing it, and starring in it. So it’s going to be a fun movie to talk about.

Craig: Well, I’m really interested to hear more about the actors because I only researched one of them and he doesn’t show up until the very, very end.

And I read some interesting stuff about him, but I didn’t. I didn’t recognize any of the others. I recognized the name, Richard Krenna, and my sister, who listens to the podcast, I think would scold me if I didn’t mention that the reason that I know that name is because on the show Friends, Phoebe wanted to write a song about Ross and Rachel’s daughter, Emma, and she sang a song like, Emma, your name causes a dilemma, cause nothing really rhymes with Emma.

Except the actor, Richard Crenna, who starred in Rambo, or something like that.

Oh God. So that’s how I know Richard Crenna from Phoebe’s song on that one episode of Friends.

Todd: He was a famous guy, died in 2003, but he’s got over 120 credits to his name, was all over television, like pretty much every TV show from the 70s or 80s. He was in an episode or two of them, but I mean his career spans back to like 1950, you know, so, um, He was a classic actor, best known more, more recently in his career for being in Rambo.

Actually, he was in the first three Rambo movies. Troutman. Yeah, that’s what Phoebe said. And then he was, he was even Colonel Denton Walters in Hot Shots Park Do, which was, you know, a Rambo slash Top Gun, What, Mel Brooks type movie, right?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was funny. Yeah, it was funny. I don’t remember if it was Mel Brooks.

But it was funny, it was Charlie Sheen.

Todd: Mm

Craig: hmm. Yeah, and I can see that. He’s a handsome, manly guy. Yes. I can see him as a lead role in this era. I mean, he fits it to a tee. He’s great. He’s

Todd: just like one of these actors from this era like, what, Tom Selleck and like Brolin. They’re just like straight guys. I don’t mean straight as in their sexuality.

I just mean they’re just very like Right. Like, uh,

Craig: masculine, you know, tall, bigger guys. Handsome,

Todd: calm, collected and cool under all circumstances. Mansplaining left and right. You know that these guys, right? Sure. But yeah, he’s been in, he’s been in a lot of stuff. I believe he was also in Leviathan. In 1989, which is another movie I really want us to get to eventually.

Craig: Yeah, I’m sure I’ve seen it, but I don’t remember. I, I feel like I remember thinking that Leviathan was a cheaper version of The Abyss. It was. I know they’re different. I, I know Leviathan’s kind of like a monster. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so, Richard Crenna, I recognize his name. The others, I know nothing about, so we’ll get to them in a second.

But, you had mentioned that it is a Haunted House movie, and it is. And it does remind me. Of lots of haunted house movies, the haunting or the haunting of Hill House or any iteration of that story, it reminded me stylistically a little bit of the woman in white to some extent, this had the feel to me of one of the darker afterschool specials.

It’s one of the only ones I ever referenced because it’s one of the only ones I remember is the Red Room, you know, like there where there’s like, you know, like a gothic house and it’s haunted and there are apparitions and stuff. I feel like I’ve already used this word once. I have a wider vocabulary, but it feels a little quaint.

Todd: Yes.

Craig: In some regards, you know, with the big gothic house. And then especially when, there’s really only one ghost, I guess. But when the, when the ghost starts appearing to one of the characters. At first, it’s very I mean, it’s all done in the type of special effect that I don’t know anything about technically, but that was so commonly used during this time where it looks like something was added to the film in post.

Is, is

Todd: that right? Yeah, it’s like an optical effect, right? Yeah, where there’s a

Craig: Right.

Todd: It’s just kind of overlaid, so it’s a little You’re right, like the lady in white had that a lot in there, didn’t it?

Craig: Well, yeah, and here, and this is not at all uncommon, at first, the apparition starts appearing to her in a vaguely human shape, and it’s all in, like, white light.

Uh huh. But it’s, it’s, it’s out of focus, and very wavy. Eventually I don’t know if her psychic powers get stronger or the ghost just is more urgent or what, but eventually it begins to appear very clearly. I mean, it’s still surrounded by a white aura and the ghost is entirely white, including its open eyeballs, which I thought was kind of cool, but you see it distinctly.

I mean, it, it, it’s a man in a suit and at, at that point, and I may have read this in like a user review or something. It, it, Feels almost Disney haunted mansion. Yes. That’s what it looks like. And it’s almost like a, like a hologram. And again, I’m not citing that as a criticism because Disney’s haunted mansion is one of my favorite rides, right?

Same here. I love it. I, I love the holograms and you know, the things appearing, you know, like in mirrors and right in front of you, all very cool, cool. Techniques that were also used in these types of movies. But it makes, you mentioned, you know, you mentioned other movies. You mentioned like Amityville and other things that came out around this time.

I’m not really surprised that this one got lost in the shuffle. Because aside from a really goofy ending, which I think probably makes it even more forgettable. Yeah. There’s not a lot that’s notable or that’s notably good. Right. About it.

Todd: Or new. Right. I mean, even for the time, it’s kind of just like, it’s so silly, really.

The things that happen to them in this house. I mean, the Amityville stuff can be a little bit suspenseful. It can be a little vague. Burnt offerings is also, well,

Craig: the same, I was, the same thing about both of them is that the threat feels more imminent and dangerous. Yes. In, in those movies, I’m afraid these people are gonna get, you know, their heads blown off by a phantom shotgun or the house is gonna POEs possess the dad and, and make him violently drown his.

Sun. Like it, it just seems a lot more tense in this one. There is a supernatural threat, but because you rarely see it. It’s a lot of people just flailing around.

I wouldn’t have even thought that they went to much effort to make it look good. Because to me, it really just looked like people flailing around. At one point there’s like an earthquake and it was some of the most ridiculous earthquake acting I’d ever seen. These people were just like jumping up against the walls.

And yeah. Oh, yeah. It was really, really funny, actually. There are other points where the, the people are supposed to be being beaten up by an invisible force, and it looks like they were just told to kind of throw themselves and jerk themselves around. Now I read in the goofs, you know, on IMDB in the goofs section, it says when one of these women is being, Moved around by this unnatural force, you can see the wires.

Yeah, I watched it on my laptop as I always do. And I certainly did not see the wires and was surprised to even find that there were wires there because unlike in something like Jaws or The Exorcist, it really didn’t look like they were being jerked around violently. Like, I can imagine a bunch of friends with jump ropes surrounding a person and just kind of playfully pulling them around.

That’s kind of what it looks like. Right. Well, apparently there was more care given to it than I saw.

Todd: When you talk about the, um, earthquake scene, it’s the difference between this and like on Star Trek, the ship, you know, being jerked around and they kind of, you know, flop around. A house isn’t a spaceship floating in space.

Like, if there’s an earthquake and people are being jerked around as violently as they’re being jerked around in here, The house would be crumbling down around them. The very foundations would be like in 20 pieces. Yeah. That’s why it looks so silly. Although on the other hand, I got to disagree with you on the one where the woman was being attacked and maybe it’s because I did watch it on a bigger screen, but coming on the heels of that ridiculous earthquake bit, I thought her bit was pretty impressive.

Comparatively, there were moments where she was clearly being pulled, you know, where she wasn’t flailing, where she was being pulled across, and I felt like of all the things that happens to everybody in this, that was, and again, within the context of all the things that happened in this movie, That was probably the most disturbing thing for me.

And I thought it was very effectively played. That said, I

Craig: found it confusing because I wasn’t really sure what they were going for. Well, the whole movie is, well, I mean, it’s not confusing that I understand that there it’s haunted. I understand that there’s a presence. I mean, we don’t really know, is it ghosts?

Is it, we don’t really know what it is. Poltergeist. We don’t know, but the, whatever it is, is capable of physically manipulating The environment and, and the people and, you know, smacking them and punching them and, and throwing them around. So, you know, that’s a legitimate threat, but this scene confused me because it was the type of throwing around that we had already seen, except it seemed a little bit more slappy.

And it was definitely a man’s voice laughing. You hear voices in the background faintly sometimes early on in the movie. To me, it sounded like children later. It sounds like in this scene, it sounds like a man. And what I imagine one of the things that made you uncomfortable as it did me was that this scene is different in that whatever the entity is, rips off her Right.

And then throws her on a mattress. And I was prepared for what was going to happen. Bracing yourself. You were right, like, because we, we’ve seen this before. You know, we have seen these kind of supernatural sexual assaults before. Mm hmm. But that’s as far as they’ll go. Like, they will suggest, it tore off her clothes.

I mean, she’s not nude, she’s in underclothes. A bra and, and panties. Yeah, it gets only that far, yeah. As far as bras and panties go, pretty modest. I mean, Not like she’s nude, but she does get thrown onto a mattress, but then everybody just comes in and she says, it just kept hitting me. It just kept hitting me.

It seems to me that they wanted to suggest something, but they weren’t willing to push the envelope. Yeah. Which is interesting because it’s an R rated movie anyway, which I, I don’t know why. I mean, I understand that this was before the PG 13 existed. So I guess by nature of it being, um, A horror film, and the devil being in it.

Maybe that was enough to push it to R, but other than that, it’s very, very tame. Very tame.

Todd: I suppose that’s why, you know, it gets, it has that after school special feel, is because it never really takes anything to an extreme. I mean, yeah, people die, that’s as extreme as anything that can happen in this world, of course.

But like, It’s not super graphic, like you said, it gets this scene that looks like it’s getting very sexual, it still seems to imply the sexuality, but it stops at her underwear, and then it’s kinda like not really mentioned, and it’s just implied very loosely, you know, where this would go right over a kid’s head.

Yes. You know, it basically, and then the whole movie’s a little bit like that, plus it’s just a mishmash of stuff, like, There’s very little consistency or rhyme or reason as to what this entity is doing throughout the house. So although there’s this overall mystery that they’re trying to piece together, it all feels a bit silly.

Classic Haunted House stuff. That’s just being pulled from this novel and that novel in this novel in that novel. Yeah Oh, they we find a book and we read some stuff in somebody’s diary and oh, I’m seeing these ghostly apparitions over here And oh now there’s an earthquake and oh now like there’s this unseen entity doing these things I saw I thought I saw a statue move right and all these things kind of happen separately But it’s not like that statue ever moves again or comes to life, right?

Or, you know, I mean, it’s all just very, it’s just a bunch of stuff.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, statues moving and coming to life is a classic trope that you continue to see. I was just going to say, I’ve kind of been meaning to say this since the beginning. Cause I, I’m beginning to think that we’re not going to get into chronological details of the plot.

It actually reminded me a lot of a movie that I really, really like that probably most people think. Is a bad movie, but early, early in our tenure, we did the movie Troll, which, which is about a group of people who move into a new house, something mystical opens up in the basement, and then chaos ensues in the building itself, and there’s a lot of threat until at the very end, the heroes get out into the sunlight, embrace, and drive away.

The exact same plot.

Todd: You kind of described it, didn’t you? The only difference is, and even Troll has a lighter tone, right? Almost childlike tone. But the difference between Troll and this movie is that Troll is wildly creative. Just, it goes in odd places and it’s fascinating and it’s just as much fantasy as it is horror.

And so, Like, Troll’s just compelling. You’re just like, what? And wow. And this movie isn’t that way, because we’ve seen all these things before in much better movies. With better consistency and way better payoff.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not a bad setup. So, what it is, is there’s this old mansion that apparently, I don’t know, Somebody, the caretaker who we first meet and know is scared of it, we don’t know why, but he is because he goes in there and he starts cleaning up and then he’s like, oh, well, I guess there’s nothing to be scared of until he starts hearing Like children’s voices in the basement and he goes down there to check things out and everything’s fine And he thinks he hears something in the furnace, but he opens it up and there’s nothing in there He’s like, oh hardy har and then the furnace explodes and he is completely on fire from head to toe and dies.

Todd: The first of a few flame effects. Yeah. And there’s people on fire effects. Yeah.

Craig: And that’s fine. But I mean, even that character felt very stereotypical, like, oh, I’m the creeped out caretaker.

Todd: Takes a swig from his bottle before he goes in. Yes,

Craig: yes. I mean, he’s, I mean, this isn’t even like an old guy. This is, uh, he’s probably younger than us, but he’s kind of like hunched over his broom, like.

It’s silly, and then we meet people again. I understand that this is how these movies work But we have to meet a whole bunch of people so that there are people that we can kill off But there are still gonna be people alive at the end. But what it basically comes down to is this Psychiatrist Richard Krenna CJ and his wife Who’s also a doctor, but I don’t know what she does.

I don’t know what kind of doctor she’s a psychology. I guess. I don’t know. Yeah. They’re buying this building. It’s an old building, Caroline, Caroline. Yeah. They they’re given a tour of this old building and it’s just a big, cool old building. I mean, it is, it’s a cool old building, but they’re told that it was built at a long time ago by this guy named.

Old Mr. Vargas, even though he died in his 30s. Which they call out, to be fair. It was built on sulfur flats or something.

Todd: Because they wanted the heat, yeah.

Craig: You’re right. But then Something happened on Vargas’s 30th birthday where all his hair turned white and nobody really ever saw him much after that, and then he died soon after.

Like, we’re never told, as far as I can remember, what happened. I guess it has something to do with the evil that’s in the house, but we’re never told.

Todd: This is the first of the piling up of things. It’s like, okay, so he builds us over these sulfur Mines or springs or something like that, and it was known as a healing place, but then the springs dried out as soon as the house was finished.

And the Indians gave this place a wide berth and call it Valley of the Devils. I mean, I expected there to be, like, an ancient burial ground. I mean, like, how many other things could there have possibly been? Like, this house was definitely doomed. Yeah, I mean, I guess And the house is impressive. Like, he’s giving them a tour.

Yeah, it’s amazing. The real estate guy. And it’s huge, and he’s like,

Clip: It said his hair turned white, and only glimpses of him were ever seen after his 30th birthday. That was before the war, the Civil War, that is. After that, it was converted to a conservatory for young women.

Todd: And there are 200 rooms in the main building, and I had to rewind, I was like, 200 rooms?

Well, yeah, and even the movie doesn’t do this, this building justice. This was actually shot in, uh, what was at this time, abandoned health spa and resort that was literally built in the mid 1800s. Huh. And then rebuilt twice. And known, uh, around the area as, I mean, the reason it was built, it was a giant hotel because there were supposedly healing springs, so it was kind of a big health spa and whatnot.

And, uh, yeah. It was taken over, I think Jesuits had the building, but weren’t doing anything with it, and they, you know, they’re the ones who rented it out for the, for this production, and then shortly thereafter, uh, it did become a, a university, and right now, to this day, it is. It’s a, I guess, fairly well accredited university of business.

Wow. It’s massive, and it’s been renovated and restored. It was in pretty bad shape, apparently, when this was shot. And then, uh, about a couple decades later, the state got a hold of it and got some money together. And I made a historical, you know, place and it’s now it looks gorgeous. You should go online and check it out.

It’s, it’s pretty interesting. I I love these old, like yeah, mid 18 hundreds, late 18 hundreds, like health spa things like Kellogg built up in Michigan, you know, for rich people to go to the healing waters. Mm-Hmm. to think that these places are still standing and are so Victorian and massive and grand.

It’s, it’s really cool. So the setting’s awesome too.

Craig: Yeah. The, it, it’s the, the entryway is. I mean, super, super high, multiple, at least two story high ceilings and columns and big staircases and then they’re like big ballrooms because they, you know, you know, I, I don’t know if this is fact or fiction, but they say in the movie it was a conservatory for girls.

And so they built all these like dance floors and ballrooms and stuff. And there are these. Big cavernous set pieces. Yeah, I, I, I, I mean, amazing things can be done with sets. Don’t get me wrong, but it just always kind of, to me, kind of add something atmospherically when things are shot on actual locations.

Yeah, this one is cool. So, so I guess they ended up buying it. I don’t know, but they bring several of their friends. Who they refer to as volunteers and I think that what what they they want to turn it into like a A drug rehabilitation center. Is that right?

Todd: It’s never outright said I think you have to piece it together but yes, i’m pretty sure that’s what his venture is

Craig: one of the People who is going to be one of their counselors felicia.

She’s the one that eventually kind of gets Supernaturally sexually assaulted. She tells one of the other girls at one point that she had been addicted to heroin and this doctor, you know, rehabbed her and saved her and now she wants to give back. So I think this is going to be a drug rehabilitation center.

It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they all show up. There’s eventually six of them, right? Three couples, um, There’s, there’s, there’s CJ and his wife, Carolyn, who’s also a doctor, but also appears to be psychic because the second she gets into the house, she knows there’s something bad going on there and starts seeing things immediately.

She is not in the house for more than 10 seconds before she sees that ghost and says nothing. I know. I understand that it’s a movie. And I understand that you have to suspend your disbelief. But if I were touring a home, which I’ve done because I’ve, I bought my home. If I were touring a home with my partner and I saw a ghost in there, I would say something,

but I don’t know. She doesn’t. And so they’re all there. And I mean, that’s the setup. It’s the exact same setup as the haunting. Yeah. You know, you have to get a big group of people into this haunted house. So creepy things can start happening to them. And that’s, It’s fine. I just wish there had been more interesting stuff going on.

Todd: Yeah, it’s, it’s, again, it’s just a whole bunch of ominous stuff piled on in the beginning, which just made me chuckle. So she sees this shimmering ghost, without a doubt. They’re talking stories about the house downstairs, and bits of the ceiling start to fall down on CJ, and Oh, hurry up, get out of the way!

Bits that probably wouldn’t harm him much, but they’re falling on him. And then she wanders out into the driveway, which is circular, and there’s this statue on there that looks, you know, it’s got kind of a gargoyle type guy sitting on it, and she reads the inscription, Disturb not he who is here. And then later, you know, after they decide they’re going to take the house, they’re moving things in two minutes later, she thinks she sees a statue move, you know, by the fireplace.

So, I mean, I was like, okay, there’s a lot of stuff going on here and it’s all, it’s all very familiar. And the other people who joined them, there’s Dwight, who’s, I guess he’s their handyman, who’s going to be really helping fix the contractor. And he’s kind of a cowboy type dude. Pete is the jokester, which I also chuckled about.

You always have to have one in. And then Felicia, like you said, then Mary, she’s the gal with the frizzy hair. And then there’s this other sort of couple, Raymond and Laurie. Raymond is introduced to us as he is lecturing his psychology class. And I guess this is going to be his last lecture because he’s going to go on to greater and better things.

At a university or something like that because he just got his phd. What is he a professor of again? I think it was psychology because he says later that oh you inspired me cj, you know when I was in your class Oh, right, right So all these are either like people that he’s rehabbed or people he’s had associations with and they all seem to deeply respect him And then He’s got this thing going on with one of his students, Lori, which is it’s so funny how lightly it’s played Yeah, because I guess it’s really no big deal, you know, but they play it so

Craig: lightly.

Yeah at the time in one moment They get very flirty at the end of class as everybody else is walking out and then he says something about oh now now We need to be discreet. Well, then they walk out in the hallway and just like start making out And I love it. So like, that’s not discreet. And it’s, it’s just funny to me because I imagine that.

But at that time, it was probably frowned upon, but like, it happened. You know, and I, I had a friend whose mom and dad, the dad was significantly older than her because he was her college professor and they met when she was his student and they got together and got married and had a big family and were happily ever after.

So I’m not necessarily one to judge. I’m just saying that looking through a modern lens. That would be Oh yeah. Probably a little bit more

Todd: than frowned upon. Well, let’s be clear, I mean, it’s just not very professional. I mean, if they’re your literal student in your class, like You know, there’s some conflict of interest there when you got a grade that you got to give this person But right sort of aside from that, I don’t know I know like I think at least three couples who’ve you know met met this way I it doesn’t scandalize me so much anymore, but it’s funny because it’s even it’s even mentioned Like, when everybody’s introducing each other, and he introduces himself and says, and this is Lori, she’s one of my students.

One of them says, Oh, you’re one of those guys, huh? And they all have a chuckle about it. Yeah, they

Craig: all

Todd: laugh. So whatever. They are all just gonna go in and like, work, put their own elbow grease into fixing up this house and make something of it. That is why CJ has assembled everybody here. Is to be part of his business venture, I guess.

Craig: Yeah. And at this point, the ghost, the shimmering white ghost is like trying to warn Caroline. She, he shows her this diary that doesn’t really have an, an enormous diary. Like I, I surely thought it was like a photo album or something. Comically large. Nobody

Todd: would write in a diary. No, it’s not a fricking diary.

It’s a giant book. It’s super thick. It’s the only thing in the house, like literally walking through the house. There’s no furniture in here. There is absolutely nothing until she’s led to this one little room where there’s a desk and plain as day on the desk is this book that is almost as big as the desk itself sitting there.

With a pile of cobwebs and dust on it that she has to blow off. And once she does and opens it up, the fireplace lights up behind her. And she gets a vision of somebody hammering a cross on an anvil. Like, was that supposed to be like, a blacksmith that at one time was in that room, like, using that fireplace to craft?

Craig: It just now occurred to me when you said that, I bet that whoever that was was making that cross. Yeah. Is that what you were sa Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, making that cross. I did not put that together when I watched it. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, no, I, cause somehow I was just like, what is happening? Like, why is there a guy with an anvil all of a sudden?

Todd: Well, I mean, I think the cross was referenced at some point, because I did have that thought at that moment, but my other thought was, was this at one time the blacksmith’s room? Cause it sure doesn’t look like

Craig: it. No, I don’t know. It was very odd. I keep trying to get to the inciting incident, which is the first weird thing that happens that they’re all aware of is the dog kind of freaks out.

They hear it howling in the basement and it’s, we see it. It’s like digging at something and then it starts howling and they’re looking for it and they find it in the basement, but it attacks its owner and then runs off. I think it’s at that point that CJ and Caroline, maybe, I don’t remember, where the dog was digging, they find like a trap door.

It’s bolted with this ornate iron cross, and they pull the cross out so that it’s, you know, it’s not bolted closed anymore. But they can’t get it open. But as soon as they walk away, it like supernaturally explodes open and all this steam comes out and that’s when the big earthquake is and all of the doors slam and all of the bars like slam down on the windows and they’re, they’re trapped in there and they can’t get out.

And the rest of it is them trying to figure out how to get out while, Individually dealing with supernatural things that are going on. Yes. And we already talked about Felicia, you know, and what happens to her. What are some of the things? That happened to the other people. I don’t remember. Dwight’s one of the first to go.

Now he goes during the earthquake, doesn’t he? Shortly thereafter. I think it’s during the earthquake and electrical cord like falls from the ceiling and he tries to grab it like a snake or something, but somehow it manages to twine itself all around him. Yeah. Yeah. And he gets electrocuted. I thought it was hilarious because in the aftermath of the, uh, Earthquake, everybody’s running around to look and see if everybody’s okay.

And somebody comes into the room where Felicia is like, just, you know, regaining consciousness of the stairs and dead Dwight is right there. And the character is like, Oh no, well, he’s

Todd: dead. That’s the other thing that took it out of it for me. And again, this is in so many movies, right? Where like people’s friends are dying all around them.

And yet, it’s immediately after they discover the body, the next scene is they’re all sitting contemplatively around a fireplace, talking about what, you know, their next steps are gonna be, and everyone’s calm and collected, and it’s like, wouldn’t you be freaking out just a little bit more, successively, throughout all this?

And I read that this movie was shot in like, 30 days, and I thought, this movie feels like it could’ve almost been shot over a couple weekends, because half of the movie is just dialogue that takes place While these people are in the same scene standing around a fire. As though nothing has just happened, just talking calmly and collectively, it’s like that, Well, I don’t know what it could be.

Well, I think it might be supernatural. No, doctor, how could you believe in the supernatural? We know there’s gotta be a logical explanation for all of this. And like, this back and forth discussion, it always comes back to that. They find a body, they find something’s happened to somebody, they’re back there by that fireplace.

It’s really kind of amusing. There’s a lack of emotion, and, and like CJ himself has got, a serious lack of emotion. I feel like his whole staff could have died off before he looked concerned and worried.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, they want to get out. I mean, they do. I don’t know. Caroline is constantly saying, there’s something in the house.

It’s not the house, there’s something in the house. I feel it. Nobody listens to her. Lori. Who is the student girlfriend at one point panics when everything gets locked up and she’s like Like and she just got ridiculously hysterical and I was so excited because I just knew knew what was coming Yeah, I have seen this setup.

I have seen this woman getting hysterical in this way

Clip: Look

at me. It’s all darling. It’s all right.

Craig: I knew he was gonna slap the shit out of her He did And it was actually shocking in how violent it was. Oh, I know. I expected him to slap her, but he did. And I feel like she comes back and there’s a big red mark on her face. And it unsettled me a little bit, to be frank, even though I had expected that.

I, I had expected it to be almost like, Comic yeah as those scenes often play out. I mean obviously different sensibilities striking a woman isn’t funny But that that was a comic trope, you know The the only way to calm the frantic woman was to yeah slapper or throw water in her face

Todd: Which then instantly calms her Right, she’s fine dead of making her more angry So the shutters as you said before all the shutters shut And, you know, by themselves, and we’ve already noticed that there are bars and doors over everything, the bars over all the windows, the doors lock by themselves, they can’t get through them, Pete picks up a folding table and tries to smash it through a window, and just gets blown back by an unseen force, him and the table just go flying, and then he stands up like, well, that was weird.

You know, and they kind of try these kinds of things, but there’s this force acting again to kind of jerk them around. Oh, and it starts raining outside. So it’s, it’s storming

Craig: and they can’t get out, but they try different things to get out. Like at one point. CJ and Pete, the goofy one, somehow access some, like, copula or something that’s open air.

And they find some rope, and they’re gonna climb down it, which should be fine, right? Except, Pete goes first, and he gets halfway down. And just starts swinging around wildly. Yeah, I know. Was that like the wind or something? I couldn’t figure that out at all. And I was also thinking like, if you’re, if something is swinging you around, what, like, just keep going down, like go faster, like you’re getting closer to the ground all the time, just keep going.

Slide down that rope. But instead he starts to try to climb back up and CJ tries to pull him up. But then I guess the rope. Gets really hot and then Pete just bursts into flame. Yes. Burst into

Todd: flame and falls to the ground. I was like, was it, did I miss something? Was there saw a lightning strike? Was this an electrical cable?

No, he just burst into flame

Craig: and burst into flame and he falls and dies.

Todd: I was really surprised we lost our jokester so early. You know, he only got one. Hilarious gag in earlier, pretending that he was hung by a noose in a room. Hung

Craig: himself. Oh

Todd: my god.

Craig: And you know, when they opened the door and it was the jump scare of him hanging and they freaked out, it was a nice jump scare, but I knew immediately it was a joke.

Oh yeah. But before he revealed it, I knew it was a joke. You used to see this, like, whoever would think that was funny, but then also during this scene on the rope, I thought it was such a missed opportunity that he didn’t get hung. Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. It would have been ironic, right? Like, the

Craig: rope should have supernaturally wrapped around his neck and he got hung there.

I know, I know. Like, haha, shows you for whatever.

Todd: I thought the same thing. And

Craig: then I think Felicia gets assaulted, I don’t know. At some point, Mary goes to get Towels or something and she gets attacked by her dog again Yeah Which pushes her over a stair rail and they both fall to their death and then somebody gets the genius idea that because There’s a lightning storm and because there are iron bars on the windows They can set up wires to electrocute the whole house And melt the bars?

Todd: Oh my god. Is that what

Craig: he said?

Todd: It was the dumbest plan. Because he saw loads of lightning rods on the scene. Like, what? You’re gonna hope that lightning strikes these lightning rods? You’re gonna divert the electricity to these bars so that when it gets there, it’s gonna melt them? Yeah, it was dumb. They noticed the generator’s working.

And so they grabbed some power tools. And. I think it’s Raymond who tries to saw through the door with a circular saw. But it’s like the door is suddenly made of steel or something because they’re like, oh, like, this is grinding the teeth right down on the circular saw, that’s crazy. While the other two are going to get cables and trying to attach them to that.

Raymond, suddenly, as he’s trying to saw through the door again, and he’s suddenly compelled to saw through his whole hand? I was very confused by that. Yeah, it’s like he looks like in his head he’s getting a little dazed or something. And we see a close up of that saw go through his entire hand. Am I wrong about this?

Craig: No, I think you’re right. I, I think that we were to believe that he was in some way compelled to do it. But that’s just odd because we never really see anything else. Like that. Mary’s corpse reanimates. Mary’s corpse reanimates very briefly. Like it just sits up long enough to scare Felicia. It does nothing else.

She backs into the electrified bar. Yes. She, so Felicia, so Felicia dies that way. And then at some point. Caroline gets possessed by the ghost, but that’s, that’s a different type of thing. This seems like mental suggestion. I wasn’t sure. This is one of the only gore effects we get. The saw kind of goes over his hand.

It looks like it saws all the way through his hand, but then they bandage him up and he’s fine.

Todd: Yeah. Well, even in the, in the wide shot or the medium shot, it’s just, he’s got blood all over his hand. Yeah. From what I saw, it looks like half his hand should be gone.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. The, but as I was. You know, scratching my head about whether or not he was somehow influenced to do that.

I thought, it doesn’t matter because that was bound to happen either way. Right. He was, he was using that circular saw on a surface that wasn’t giving. The tiniest, tiniest of slips would send that thing flying. And you would certainly cut your hand off. Yes,

Todd: exactly.

Craig: Well, I’m not, you know, Gosh, craftsmen, but most of my friends were theater majors, and so they all had to take stagecraft and the most important thing in building stagecraft or otherwise is safety.

And that, it was just stupid.

You’re gonna

Todd: cut a hand off, and he did. We missed one bit that I, that I wanted to mention. Caroline wakes up. Okay, this is before. Everything gets wired up and Felicia dies and Ray cuts his hand, I think. Or maybe it’s after he cuts his hand, but it’s before she dies and before the other kid, the other woman, Mary, sits up.

CJ notices that Mary’s body is gone somewhere. Carolyn wakes up and sees that shimmering figure gesturing at a cross by the fireplace. And he just beckons her to one room and into another room and she follows him into this giant room. Where all of the others are creepily just sort of standing around Mary like they moved her body there And now they’re just looking down at it.

And then I have no idea what was happening in this scene Yeah, what was this all about? CJ spins around and suddenly he’s very hairy He’s got bushy eyebrows and maybe his beard is bigger or something. He looks like the guy from Witch Board

Craig: Yes, the guy at the end of Witch Board.

Todd: Dude, that was exactly what I was thinking She holds up the cross and you can’t do this Well, do what?

What were they doing? I have no idea. Which blows them all back and away across the floor. And then, she’s like, Fight back! Fight back! And he grabs her, and is like, choking her or something, and she’s struggling to get out, and pulls him in front of a mirror, and then he looks in the mirror and gets freaked out, and then the mirror breaks.

And then, they’re back by the fire, calmly chatting again. Was that a vision? I have no idea. Yeah, that was bizarre.

Craig: No, I, that, that reminded me of Gothic. Oh yeah, we’re, the whole

Todd: movie is just visions, really. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know. So the Vargas ghost appears to Carolyn and points it across and then they disappear.

Carolyn says to CJ, you’re the one he wants. There has to be a key to this prison so they go to the diary and in the diary now It says something like there’s an angel with a key and a chain and he laid his hand on the devil and bound him for a Thousand years. I know.

Todd: And I’m like, oh my god, is this really, are we dealing with actual Satan here?

Is that what this is

Craig: gonna be? God at some point Ray, Ray somehow gets out like there’s a broken window or something and he gets out But then he just gets That was so weird. Outdoors. It was weird. He runs,

Todd: he breaks through the window, he runs out, he’s like, I’m free, I’m free! And he wanders into the middle of that, instead of to the car or anywhere else, he wanders into the middle of that thing and then it’s like quicksand.

Again, reminded me of Nancy trying to get away from Freddy on the staircase. I don’t know. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Just, he starts falling into goop and then it just takes him down until he’s gone. So it’s quicksand in the yard now.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: And then the window seals itself back up again. Oh man.

Craig: And that’s when Caroline literally gets possessed.

Like the Vargas ghost sits down in her lap, I feel like, all Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Swayze style, and like takes her over and. says that he sacrificed the caretaker to scare them away. So he was the one that killed the caretaker. That was very nice. But then he says, you released the evil when you opened that door.

So you have to return the beast to the pit and then never disturb this place again. And so they try to go to the basement, but like the wind tries to keep them out and they try to close the pit door, but there’s more wind. And then she just falls in. I was like, guys. Be careful.

Todd: I honestly wasn’t expecting that.

I mean falling in the big smoking pit that I figured led to hell like, oh, okay This is going somewhere. And he jumps in after her. It’s like, oh. I

Craig: know and I was, I was, you know, Like, I don’t know if he could see her fine, but if that were me and that was like a pit to hell I’d be like, I guess she’s gone.

Sorry. I’ll still try to seal the door. Yeah, I’ll do my best! But he jumps in too, and somehow they lost the cross, and then He walks into a big white stone room. I read that there was originally a different ending, or they had planned a different ending, but the studio Wanted the protagonists to literally meet the devil at the end.

So CJ walks into this giant cavernous white room and meets the devil.

Todd: I know.

Craig: Oh boy. I was

Todd: rolling my eyes. And the devil could not be more hammily acted by Victor Buono, who is a hammy actor anyway. We’ve been in a million things, television, movies. I was a big fan of the Batman, the 60s version of Batman that played in reruns.

And he was the King Tut character in that, but he always played these kind of characters. But this guy’s been in Planet of the Apes and what happened to Baby Jane.

Craig: Yeah, I remember him from that, exactly. He was Jane’s smarmy a companyist that she hired out of the newspaper who kept assuring her that, you know, they were going to be, she was going to be famous again.

It was really, if I remember correctly, it was really just kind of out of his morbid, like he was just taking advantage of her, but I definitely remember him from that, but he’s just goofy. And I just don’t understand the problem that I have with it is just, it doesn’t fit tonally with the rest of the movie.

No. All of a sudden. It kind of feels like a Mel Brooks comedy. And I actually would find that hilarious if it were kind of a horror comedy and then you get to the end and the devil’s just kind of this goofy guy who is just messing with you and laughing at you from afar. But here it just, it just seems stupid.

Clip: What is it

Craig: you

Clip: want from me? My

Craig: accounts.

Clip: I fill my accounts. You have a will, Mr. Arnold. Strong, sometimes misdirected, but a will. So you have some value, even among your kind. By the way, where is that piece of holy excrement? Your cross. It’s a thing of God. How could it come here? Don’t question me. I have little enough patience.

Craig: One of the things that I did like, I don’t know, he starts, like, taunting CJ and telling him it’s all his fault, and One of the things that I did like about this scene is that the devil’s look, like, he just, he looks a little bit jovial at first, But his look becomes more sinister. Yeah. They do more sinister makeup on him.

Cut away in more makeup and cut away in more makeup. Over the brief three or four minutes, That he’s in the movie because this is at the very end like I’m watching this and all this is happening And there’s like five minutes Yeah And the devil wants the cross and he’s kind of fighting with CJ and then out of nowhere Carolyn shows up and stabs the devil with the cross.

Yes, and they run away. They run away But she takes after she stabs him I guess she pulls it back out of him and takes it and so they get out and they seal the door up Again with the cross and as soon as the door is sealed the house Opens back up. The doors fly open, the, the bars fly up, the, you know, the shades open.

And again, like I said, just like at the end of Troll, they emerge from the building, into the sunrise, they embrace. They get into their car to drive away. Ghost Vargas waves at them from the window. Yes. The end. Oh god.

Todd: Oh

Craig: god, this

Todd: movie.

Craig: Ha

Todd: ha ha ha ha. I don’t know. I mean, that’s the problem. They should not have had to meet the devil.

That was a producer mistake. I just feel like the devil can do anything. If the cross is lost, the cross is lost. Just, when you introduce the devil as your protagonist, physically in front of you, you don’t escape that, you know? You don’t sneak around behind him and grab the cross when he’s not looking and stab him.

He doesn’t even need the frickin cross. Like, why, just go. The door’s open, it’s been open for the duration of the movie. He could have just left. He didn’t need to hang out down there any longer. I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t really get it. It’s dumb.

Craig: Initially it was just supposed to be some demonic force.

And I think that that would be better because this is, you know, silly, but there’s that old phrase. Which is better, the devil you know or the devil you don’t know. If you’re gonna go with the devil you know, in a horror movie, it better be really good. And there are times that I’ve seen that, like, the one that always pops to mind, to me, is, and I don’t know if this is technically supposed to be Satan, but certainly a devilish figure, but Tim Curry in Legend.

Right. If you, if you’re gonna go, Devil go, devil,

Todd: that’s badass.

Craig: I think I’ve seen other effective ones too, but I think that I would be more frightened by something unknown, something original, or with its own lore, whether it be actual lore or just movie lore. I think that would be scary. There’s somebody in the credits on IMDB credited as the demon.

I don’t have any idea who or what that was.

Todd: No. I don’t either. I just, uh, what, really, like, in the 1800s, this guy named Vargas built a giant house and managed to seal the devil in the basement, just with a little cross that could be dug up, and then he gets unleashed, and all he does is mess around with the people in the house for a while, but then he gets bested, and this Dinky little cross like closes the seal and now we’re without the devil for a while for

Craig: another thousand years There’s there’s a whole thing What’s her name Caroline reads something about how?

Somebody you know trapped him for a thousand years, but when the thousand years comes he’ll be back You know, we talked about this in such a disjointed way. I’m afraid this is going to be really boring. Right. As I really kind of found the movie, I, when you suggested it, I was pleased to see that it was only an hour and 24 minutes long.

And I can’t say that it felt that long. Oftentimes I say, Oh my gosh, this hour and a half movie felt like three hours. This wasn’t like that. It didn’t feel super long. I just wasn’t particularly interested. No. And so. I just kind of kept wishing it was over. Once again, I took a break in the middle and took like a two hour nap and then I got back up and finished it.

I didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t recommend searching it out. You can find something better.

Todd: Yeah, I mean, it’s not terrible. We’ve seen Movies. And we’ve seen a lot of movies like this. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with doing a Haunted House movie. They’ve all got the same tropes and things like that. And, all right, you want to throw the devil in there?

Fine. It was just, it was just so disjointed and unfocused and ultimately not satisfying. And you could kind of tell it wasn’t going to be.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

Todd: About halfway through just because it was so derivative and so eye rolling. That I can’t imagine anyone being terribly emotionally invested in it and therefore very freaked out by it.

Craig: Plus, it’s not very scary. No. It’s not very funny. There are moments, like that, the earthquake moment, that border on so bad it’s funny, but that one scene is not enough to save it.

Todd: Well, I say, don’t watch this, watch this, like, Don’t watch this movie. You want to see a highly entertaining Haunted House movie from around the same time period.

See, Amityville 2, The Possession, way better vibes and feel and way more fun. And Raymond from this movie was Father Tom in that film.

Craig: Well, and I feel like, I mean, it’s been, it’s been so long since we talked about it, and I haven’t watched it since, but if you’re looking for like a funny kind of thing.

Bloodbath at the house of death. Oh yeah.

Todd: That’s total comedy.

Craig: That was really goofy and fun and funny and, and kind of, kind of with the same vibe, but it leans into the humor. And I enjoyed that movie. I had a good time with that movie. This one. I, uh, I could have passed. Yeah. I, I would, I would, I, I don’t feel more complete having seen it.

I it’s, it’s completely unmemorable. Five days from now, I’ll remember nothing about it.

Todd: Right. Of course. We’ll be comparing other movies to it. It’ll be a benchmark for us for a while and not in a good way. I’m glad we watched it, though, because I’ve been intensely curious about it for decades, so, um, I’m glad we finally got to see it.

Kind of sad to see how disappointing it is, but not altogether surprised, either. Heh heh heh heh. Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can find us online just by googling Two Guys in a Chainsaw podcast. Let us know what Haunted House movies you love and you’d like to see us, uh, review.

Uh, you can find us at any one of our places online, uh ChainsawHorror. com, Facebook, Twitter. Leave us a review wherever you listen to our podcast. That’s one of the best things you can do to help spread the word.

Craig: You should check out the new design at ChainsawHorror. com because Todd’s been working really hard on it, and it’s really cool.

Oh, thanks,

Todd: Greg. We’ve got some nice little cartoonish representations of us that may or may not be accurate. I love it. You gave me way more hair, and I love it. Sometimes I like cartoon me a lot better than me. Our patrons know for sure, though, we go behind the scenes with them. We do video chats with them.

We got a Christopher Pike book club still going strong, but we do a lot of fun things for our patrons. And if that is something that you’re interested in being a part of. Patreon. com slash Chainsaw Podcast, just five bucks a month gets you access to minisodes and all the fun stuff that happens behind the scenes over there.

Until next time, I’m Todd, and I’m Craig, with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

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A typical haunted-house story gets a Satanic twist in this lackluster 70’s entry that almost feels like a goofy made-for-TV movie. So naturally, although we were hoping for much better, we had a blast picking it apart and groaning.

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The Evil (1978)

Episode 396, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I am Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: This week, well, I just kind of dug into our pile of movies. You know, back when we started this podcast a little while ago. What has it been now, eight years? At least, I think. Yeah, eight or nine. We might be in our ninth or tenth year, I’m not sure.

Craig: I think we started in 2015, like late 2015.

Todd: Yeah, we did. Time flies, and not long after we started, I moved to China. You might remember, although I’m not even sure if you still have it anymore, Craig, before I left for China, knowing that we were going to be apart, but still going to continue the podcast, I loaded up a hard drive full of movies.

That I knew that I was going to want to do eventually some movies that were hard to find and, and all that. And I made a copy of it for Craig as well, so that he would have those thinking that we would kind of plow through these and we haven’t dipped into that too much. A lot of movies that we, that were on that hard drive, I still want to get to.

A lot of them were some things that I’d either seen when I was younger. Or, I had seen them on the video store shelves, but always wanted to do them, but didn’t. And this was one of those. And because I’ve been really, really busy this summer, really, with my son visiting me here in China, I just didn’t have time this week to pick a movie, and it was my turn to pick a movie.

So, kind of at the last minute, I pulled that hard drive out, I looked through it, and I just almost picked a movie at random. And I sent that to Craig and said, let’s just do this this week. The movie I picked is 1978’s The Evil. A haunted house movie and I’m always down for a good haunted house movie and this movie I remember seeing on the video store shelves when I was perusing the horror sections on those Friday nights when I was in high school looking for a horror movie to do.

Never really watched it until now and that is my history with it. Craig, how about you? Had you heard of this movie or even seen it before?

Craig: No, I had never heard of it. And it was actually kind of just typing it into Google or even into IMDB. Like it didn’t pop right up. Like you had to scroll, like it would bring up a lot of other titles with evil in the title.

There’s a lot of them. Yeah. Before you even got to the evil. So no, and I wasn’t familiar with it at all. I do still have that hard drive. I haven’t tried to use it in forever. It’s been so long. I don’t even know if it’s compatible. With my computer. TV. It’s just funny. It also, it also speaks to how long we’ve been doing this because it seems kind of quaint now that you.

Felt it necessary to put all of those movies on a hard drive, which I always appreciated and still appreciate, but since that time Nearly everything we do is widely available, you know, online. Thank God

Todd: Tubi TV Between Tubi, which seems to have most of the esoteric things we want. Yeah, and then Shudder, you know, which We might as well be shilling for, yeah, you can almost find anything.

Craig: Honestly, at this point I’m, and again, we’re not getting paid for any of this, but I’m more likely to shill for Tubi. They have an extensive, extensive horror catalog. Um, and it’s free. It’s awesome. I mean, yeah, you have to watch ads, but they have figured out their model. I, they are outperforming the other premium streaming services.

And they’re, they’re marketing on that, like, we have so many more viewers than Netflix or Hulu or any of these others.

Todd: Wow.

Craig: Yeah, they’re, they’re kind of my go to. It’s pretty great. And this is the kind of movie that’s on there. Yeah, it is. You can find some, I mean, you’ll, you’ll find a lot of garbage on there too, but there’s, uh, a lot of really cool stuff.

Now, I don’t know which category I would put this into. I certainly wouldn’t put it into the garbage category. No. I have seen far, far, far, far worse. But I didn’t love it either.

Todd: Yeah, I know what you mean. I didn’t love it. Maybe for its time, it was probably, it got decent reviews for its time. Yeah. You know, released in theaters, did fairly well.

And it comes at kind of an interesting time in history. This is 1978, right? And I was just watching this and I was thinking, oh yeah, this, this really falls into, Burnt Offerings came out in 76. So, you know, two years before this, the year before this, we had the Sentinel and even Hausu over in Japan. I mean, this has the flavor of those plus Amityville Horror, which came out in 79.

I mean, it just seems like this comes square in the middle. Of a whole bunch of movies that, you know, in the late seventies that were all. About either haunted houses were possession or some combination of the two. And there’s a lot of crossover here with the cast and with the director, the director, interestingly enough, his name is Gus Triconis.

And if you go to his IMDB page, you’re going to see that he has directed a 48. Things. He was also an actor, probably most famous for being Indio. In the West Side Story, the 1961 West Side Story. But most of his career, he was directing. And what he had been directing was mostly cheap, indie, drive in or grindhouse stuff.

He was originally kind of well known for doing that. So, I mean, if you go and look through here, we’re talking about Five the Hard Way, Supercock, The Swinging Barmaids. Nashville girl, the student body, she’s dressed to kill, you know, all these kinds of like, you can just tell from the titles, sensational, low budget, but highly respected for doing these kinds of things.

And he did a ton of TV, particularly after this movie, he seemed to pretty much just direct episodes of TV shows or tons. Of tv movies and so you remember that beauty and the beast tv series in the 80s with lynda hamilton Yeah with lynda hamilton that one always fascinated me. He directed 12 episodes of that quantum leap the commish Oh, I loved quantum leap, right?

He did 22 episodes of baywatch. So the director is uh, you know, pretty decent Interesting conversion here and this is a total coincidence We just did a minisode for our patrons, and Craig picked it, he, we did it over the Twilight Zone 1980s revival of that series, and you picked a particular episode called Grandma, and the Twilight Zone episodes there were, were bunched into three, so like one, um, I, I guess I would say episode would be like three stories in there.

And the Grandma episode was bundled with two other stories. One of those stories was called Cold Reading. And guess who directed it?

Craig: That’s funny. I was, I was all prepared for you to say, and guess who directed grandma. Gus Triconis and that was going to blow my mind. I know, right? That was, that was going to blow my mind, but still an interesting coincidence.

I I’m not super proud to say it, but I’m not ashamed of it either. Like I’m big time into like celebrity gossip. And so, and so one of the things that was most interesting to me about Gus Triconis was that before he found any success in the industry, he married and also completely green Goldie Hawn. Yeah.

When they were, when they were both. They got married very, very young and then she got laughing and just her star was rising at an incredible, incredible rate. And she wanted to start having kids right away. but he thought she was too flighty and so they ended up getting a divorce. In the divorce settlement, he demanded 75, 000 from her and out at first she was outraged and I read, I don’t know if this was an interview or something, but you know, it was like his perspective.

He said, you know, here she was on the verge of making millions and I literally had 125 to my name. So apparently, Eventually, after giving it some thought, she relented and gave him his 75, 000. And he said that they, you know, because then they both went on to be successful. I mean, she became an enormous star, still is a huge star, a legend.

Right. And, you know, he was very successful himself and in the same industry. So he said their, their paths crossed from time to time and they were always Friendly, and he was very happy for her success. So, you know, it all ended okay, but it has nothing to do with this movie. No, I’m fascinated by

Todd: Hollywood stories.

Oh yeah, of course. That’s great. Well, another interesting thing, you know, we’ve done a lot of movies on this podcast. One that we did that was also in the same realm. It was when I decided we’re going to do like slashers from 1981, this very odd category. David Sheldon, the Ri, one of the writers of this credited, he produced just before dawn and then went on to produce what for its time in 1976.

I’m sorry, this was before, just before Dawn, but in 1976, he produced and, uh, wrote to this film called Grizzly, which was this phenomenal, a low budget success. It was one of these movies that, for its time in 1976. Like was the indie breakout, you know, sort of the Blair Witch Project of its time. It cost almost, it cost very little to make, but then, uh, became world famous and grossed like 52 times the cost of its production.

And then that went on to spawn, uh, several others. The sequels. And, uh, shortly after he did Grizzly two years later, he was executive producer of the Manateau. Oh! One of our all time favorites. One of

Craig: my favorite movies that we’ve ever

Todd: done. Oh, God. It’s

Craig: fantastic. If

Todd: you haven’t heard our Manateau episode, oh, Jesus, go back and listen to it.

I

Craig: think it’s one of our best. It’s one of my all time

Todd: favorites. Uh. One of the other writers in here, Galen Thompson, worked a bit with Steven Spielberg with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 1941 all that’s of course after this one of my favorite Roger Corman movies called battle beyond the stars He did 1980 just a couple years after this So, um, yeah, and that’s not even getting into the actors, which I’m sure we’ll talk about as we go through it So, I mean, you know, this movie’s got a unique spot, I think in the Just the genre itself of these sort of haunted house movies and possession movies kind of coming out around this time.

And then it’s got this really interesting intersection of characters who are involved in writing it, producing it, and starring in it. So it’s going to be a fun movie to talk about.

Craig: Well, I’m really interested to hear more about the actors because I only researched one of them and he doesn’t show up until the very, very end.

And I read some interesting stuff about him, but I didn’t. I didn’t recognize any of the others. I recognized the name, Richard Krenna, and my sister, who listens to the podcast, I think would scold me if I didn’t mention that the reason that I know that name is because on the show Friends, Phoebe wanted to write a song about Ross and Rachel’s daughter, Emma, and she sang a song like, Emma, your name causes a dilemma, cause nothing really rhymes with Emma.

Except the actor, Richard Crenna, who starred in Rambo, or something like that.

Oh God. So that’s how I know Richard Crenna from Phoebe’s song on that one episode of Friends.

Todd: He was a famous guy, died in 2003, but he’s got over 120 credits to his name, was all over television, like pretty much every TV show from the 70s or 80s. He was in an episode or two of them, but I mean his career spans back to like 1950, you know, so, um, He was a classic actor, best known more, more recently in his career for being in Rambo.

Actually, he was in the first three Rambo movies. Troutman. Yeah, that’s what Phoebe said. And then he was, he was even Colonel Denton Walters in Hot Shots Park Do, which was, you know, a Rambo slash Top Gun, What, Mel Brooks type movie, right?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was funny. Yeah, it was funny. I don’t remember if it was Mel Brooks.

But it was funny, it was Charlie Sheen.

Todd: Mm

Craig: hmm. Yeah, and I can see that. He’s a handsome, manly guy. Yes. I can see him as a lead role in this era. I mean, he fits it to a tee. He’s great. He’s

Todd: just like one of these actors from this era like, what, Tom Selleck and like Brolin. They’re just like straight guys. I don’t mean straight as in their sexuality.

I just mean they’re just very like Right. Like, uh,

Craig: masculine, you know, tall, bigger guys. Handsome,

Todd: calm, collected and cool under all circumstances. Mansplaining left and right. You know that these guys, right? Sure. But yeah, he’s been in, he’s been in a lot of stuff. I believe he was also in Leviathan. In 1989, which is another movie I really want us to get to eventually.

Craig: Yeah, I’m sure I’ve seen it, but I don’t remember. I, I feel like I remember thinking that Leviathan was a cheaper version of The Abyss. It was. I know they’re different. I, I know Leviathan’s kind of like a monster. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so, Richard Crenna, I recognize his name. The others, I know nothing about, so we’ll get to them in a second.

But, you had mentioned that it is a Haunted House movie, and it is. And it does remind me. Of lots of haunted house movies, the haunting or the haunting of Hill House or any iteration of that story, it reminded me stylistically a little bit of the woman in white to some extent, this had the feel to me of one of the darker afterschool specials.

It’s one of the only ones I ever referenced because it’s one of the only ones I remember is the Red Room, you know, like there where there’s like, you know, like a gothic house and it’s haunted and there are apparitions and stuff. I feel like I’ve already used this word once. I have a wider vocabulary, but it feels a little quaint.

Todd: Yes.

Craig: In some regards, you know, with the big gothic house. And then especially when, there’s really only one ghost, I guess. But when the, when the ghost starts appearing to one of the characters. At first, it’s very I mean, it’s all done in the type of special effect that I don’t know anything about technically, but that was so commonly used during this time where it looks like something was added to the film in post.

Is, is

Todd: that right? Yeah, it’s like an optical effect, right? Yeah, where there’s a

Craig: Right.

Todd: It’s just kind of overlaid, so it’s a little You’re right, like the lady in white had that a lot in there, didn’t it?

Craig: Well, yeah, and here, and this is not at all uncommon, at first, the apparition starts appearing to her in a vaguely human shape, and it’s all in, like, white light.

Uh huh. But it’s, it’s, it’s out of focus, and very wavy. Eventually I don’t know if her psychic powers get stronger or the ghost just is more urgent or what, but eventually it begins to appear very clearly. I mean, it’s still surrounded by a white aura and the ghost is entirely white, including its open eyeballs, which I thought was kind of cool, but you see it distinctly.

I mean, it, it, it’s a man in a suit and at, at that point, and I may have read this in like a user review or something. It, it, Feels almost Disney haunted mansion. Yes. That’s what it looks like. And it’s almost like a, like a hologram. And again, I’m not citing that as a criticism because Disney’s haunted mansion is one of my favorite rides, right?

Same here. I love it. I, I love the holograms and you know, the things appearing, you know, like in mirrors and right in front of you, all very cool, cool. Techniques that were also used in these types of movies. But it makes, you mentioned, you know, you mentioned other movies. You mentioned like Amityville and other things that came out around this time.

I’m not really surprised that this one got lost in the shuffle. Because aside from a really goofy ending, which I think probably makes it even more forgettable. Yeah. There’s not a lot that’s notable or that’s notably good. Right. About it.

Todd: Or new. Right. I mean, even for the time, it’s kind of just like, it’s so silly, really.

The things that happen to them in this house. I mean, the Amityville stuff can be a little bit suspenseful. It can be a little vague. Burnt offerings is also, well,

Craig: the same, I was, the same thing about both of them is that the threat feels more imminent and dangerous. Yes. In, in those movies, I’m afraid these people are gonna get, you know, their heads blown off by a phantom shotgun or the house is gonna POEs possess the dad and, and make him violently drown his.

Sun. Like it, it just seems a lot more tense in this one. There is a supernatural threat, but because you rarely see it. It’s a lot of people just flailing around.

I wouldn’t have even thought that they went to much effort to make it look good. Because to me, it really just looked like people flailing around. At one point there’s like an earthquake and it was some of the most ridiculous earthquake acting I’d ever seen. These people were just like jumping up against the walls.

And yeah. Oh, yeah. It was really, really funny, actually. There are other points where the, the people are supposed to be being beaten up by an invisible force, and it looks like they were just told to kind of throw themselves and jerk themselves around. Now I read in the goofs, you know, on IMDB in the goofs section, it says when one of these women is being, Moved around by this unnatural force, you can see the wires.

Yeah, I watched it on my laptop as I always do. And I certainly did not see the wires and was surprised to even find that there were wires there because unlike in something like Jaws or The Exorcist, it really didn’t look like they were being jerked around violently. Like, I can imagine a bunch of friends with jump ropes surrounding a person and just kind of playfully pulling them around.

That’s kind of what it looks like. Right. Well, apparently there was more care given to it than I saw.

Todd: When you talk about the, um, earthquake scene, it’s the difference between this and like on Star Trek, the ship, you know, being jerked around and they kind of, you know, flop around. A house isn’t a spaceship floating in space.

Like, if there’s an earthquake and people are being jerked around as violently as they’re being jerked around in here, The house would be crumbling down around them. The very foundations would be like in 20 pieces. Yeah. That’s why it looks so silly. Although on the other hand, I got to disagree with you on the one where the woman was being attacked and maybe it’s because I did watch it on a bigger screen, but coming on the heels of that ridiculous earthquake bit, I thought her bit was pretty impressive.

Comparatively, there were moments where she was clearly being pulled, you know, where she wasn’t flailing, where she was being pulled across, and I felt like of all the things that happens to everybody in this, that was, and again, within the context of all the things that happened in this movie, That was probably the most disturbing thing for me.

And I thought it was very effectively played. That said, I

Craig: found it confusing because I wasn’t really sure what they were going for. Well, the whole movie is, well, I mean, it’s not confusing that I understand that there it’s haunted. I understand that there’s a presence. I mean, we don’t really know, is it ghosts?

Is it, we don’t really know what it is. Poltergeist. We don’t know, but the, whatever it is, is capable of physically manipulating The environment and, and the people and, you know, smacking them and punching them and, and throwing them around. So, you know, that’s a legitimate threat, but this scene confused me because it was the type of throwing around that we had already seen, except it seemed a little bit more slappy.

And it was definitely a man’s voice laughing. You hear voices in the background faintly sometimes early on in the movie. To me, it sounded like children later. It sounds like in this scene, it sounds like a man. And what I imagine one of the things that made you uncomfortable as it did me was that this scene is different in that whatever the entity is, rips off her Right.

And then throws her on a mattress. And I was prepared for what was going to happen. Bracing yourself. You were right, like, because we, we’ve seen this before. You know, we have seen these kind of supernatural sexual assaults before. Mm hmm. But that’s as far as they’ll go. Like, they will suggest, it tore off her clothes.

I mean, she’s not nude, she’s in underclothes. A bra and, and panties. Yeah, it gets only that far, yeah. As far as bras and panties go, pretty modest. I mean, Not like she’s nude, but she does get thrown onto a mattress, but then everybody just comes in and she says, it just kept hitting me. It just kept hitting me.

It seems to me that they wanted to suggest something, but they weren’t willing to push the envelope. Yeah. Which is interesting because it’s an R rated movie anyway, which I, I don’t know why. I mean, I understand that this was before the PG 13 existed. So I guess by nature of it being, um, A horror film, and the devil being in it.

Maybe that was enough to push it to R, but other than that, it’s very, very tame. Very tame.

Todd: I suppose that’s why, you know, it gets, it has that after school special feel, is because it never really takes anything to an extreme. I mean, yeah, people die, that’s as extreme as anything that can happen in this world, of course.

But like, It’s not super graphic, like you said, it gets this scene that looks like it’s getting very sexual, it still seems to imply the sexuality, but it stops at her underwear, and then it’s kinda like not really mentioned, and it’s just implied very loosely, you know, where this would go right over a kid’s head.

Yes. You know, it basically, and then the whole movie’s a little bit like that, plus it’s just a mishmash of stuff, like, There’s very little consistency or rhyme or reason as to what this entity is doing throughout the house. So although there’s this overall mystery that they’re trying to piece together, it all feels a bit silly.

Classic Haunted House stuff. That’s just being pulled from this novel and that novel in this novel in that novel. Yeah Oh, they we find a book and we read some stuff in somebody’s diary and oh, I’m seeing these ghostly apparitions over here And oh now there’s an earthquake and oh now like there’s this unseen entity doing these things I saw I thought I saw a statue move right and all these things kind of happen separately But it’s not like that statue ever moves again or comes to life, right?

Or, you know, I mean, it’s all just very, it’s just a bunch of stuff.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, statues moving and coming to life is a classic trope that you continue to see. I was just going to say, I’ve kind of been meaning to say this since the beginning. Cause I, I’m beginning to think that we’re not going to get into chronological details of the plot.

It actually reminded me a lot of a movie that I really, really like that probably most people think. Is a bad movie, but early, early in our tenure, we did the movie Troll, which, which is about a group of people who move into a new house, something mystical opens up in the basement, and then chaos ensues in the building itself, and there’s a lot of threat until at the very end, the heroes get out into the sunlight, embrace, and drive away.

The exact same plot.

Todd: You kind of described it, didn’t you? The only difference is, and even Troll has a lighter tone, right? Almost childlike tone. But the difference between Troll and this movie is that Troll is wildly creative. Just, it goes in odd places and it’s fascinating and it’s just as much fantasy as it is horror.

And so, Like, Troll’s just compelling. You’re just like, what? And wow. And this movie isn’t that way, because we’ve seen all these things before in much better movies. With better consistency and way better payoff.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not a bad setup. So, what it is, is there’s this old mansion that apparently, I don’t know, Somebody, the caretaker who we first meet and know is scared of it, we don’t know why, but he is because he goes in there and he starts cleaning up and then he’s like, oh, well, I guess there’s nothing to be scared of until he starts hearing Like children’s voices in the basement and he goes down there to check things out and everything’s fine And he thinks he hears something in the furnace, but he opens it up and there’s nothing in there He’s like, oh hardy har and then the furnace explodes and he is completely on fire from head to toe and dies.

Todd: The first of a few flame effects. Yeah. And there’s people on fire effects. Yeah.

Craig: And that’s fine. But I mean, even that character felt very stereotypical, like, oh, I’m the creeped out caretaker.

Todd: Takes a swig from his bottle before he goes in. Yes,

Craig: yes. I mean, he’s, I mean, this isn’t even like an old guy. This is, uh, he’s probably younger than us, but he’s kind of like hunched over his broom, like.

It’s silly, and then we meet people again. I understand that this is how these movies work But we have to meet a whole bunch of people so that there are people that we can kill off But there are still gonna be people alive at the end. But what it basically comes down to is this Psychiatrist Richard Krenna CJ and his wife Who’s also a doctor, but I don’t know what she does.

I don’t know what kind of doctor she’s a psychology. I guess. I don’t know. Yeah. They’re buying this building. It’s an old building, Caroline, Caroline. Yeah. They they’re given a tour of this old building and it’s just a big, cool old building. I mean, it is, it’s a cool old building, but they’re told that it was built at a long time ago by this guy named.

Old Mr. Vargas, even though he died in his 30s. Which they call out, to be fair. It was built on sulfur flats or something.

Todd: Because they wanted the heat, yeah.

Craig: You’re right. But then Something happened on Vargas’s 30th birthday where all his hair turned white and nobody really ever saw him much after that, and then he died soon after.

Like, we’re never told, as far as I can remember, what happened. I guess it has something to do with the evil that’s in the house, but we’re never told.

Todd: This is the first of the piling up of things. It’s like, okay, so he builds us over these sulfur Mines or springs or something like that, and it was known as a healing place, but then the springs dried out as soon as the house was finished.

And the Indians gave this place a wide berth and call it Valley of the Devils. I mean, I expected there to be, like, an ancient burial ground. I mean, like, how many other things could there have possibly been? Like, this house was definitely doomed. Yeah, I mean, I guess And the house is impressive. Like, he’s giving them a tour.

Yeah, it’s amazing. The real estate guy. And it’s huge, and he’s like,

Clip: It said his hair turned white, and only glimpses of him were ever seen after his 30th birthday. That was before the war, the Civil War, that is. After that, it was converted to a conservatory for young women.

Todd: And there are 200 rooms in the main building, and I had to rewind, I was like, 200 rooms?

Well, yeah, and even the movie doesn’t do this, this building justice. This was actually shot in, uh, what was at this time, abandoned health spa and resort that was literally built in the mid 1800s. Huh. And then rebuilt twice. And known, uh, around the area as, I mean, the reason it was built, it was a giant hotel because there were supposedly healing springs, so it was kind of a big health spa and whatnot.

And, uh, yeah. It was taken over, I think Jesuits had the building, but weren’t doing anything with it, and they, you know, they’re the ones who rented it out for the, for this production, and then shortly thereafter, uh, it did become a, a university, and right now, to this day, it is. It’s a, I guess, fairly well accredited university of business.

Wow. It’s massive, and it’s been renovated and restored. It was in pretty bad shape, apparently, when this was shot. And then, uh, about a couple decades later, the state got a hold of it and got some money together. And I made a historical, you know, place and it’s now it looks gorgeous. You should go online and check it out.

It’s, it’s pretty interesting. I I love these old, like yeah, mid 18 hundreds, late 18 hundreds, like health spa things like Kellogg built up in Michigan, you know, for rich people to go to the healing waters. Mm-Hmm. to think that these places are still standing and are so Victorian and massive and grand.

It’s, it’s really cool. So the setting’s awesome too.

Craig: Yeah. The, it, it’s the, the entryway is. I mean, super, super high, multiple, at least two story high ceilings and columns and big staircases and then they’re like big ballrooms because they, you know, you know, I, I don’t know if this is fact or fiction, but they say in the movie it was a conservatory for girls.

And so they built all these like dance floors and ballrooms and stuff. And there are these. Big cavernous set pieces. Yeah, I, I, I, I mean, amazing things can be done with sets. Don’t get me wrong, but it just always kind of, to me, kind of add something atmospherically when things are shot on actual locations.

Yeah, this one is cool. So, so I guess they ended up buying it. I don’t know, but they bring several of their friends. Who they refer to as volunteers and I think that what what they they want to turn it into like a A drug rehabilitation center. Is that right?

Todd: It’s never outright said I think you have to piece it together but yes, i’m pretty sure that’s what his venture is

Craig: one of the People who is going to be one of their counselors felicia.

She’s the one that eventually kind of gets Supernaturally sexually assaulted. She tells one of the other girls at one point that she had been addicted to heroin and this doctor, you know, rehabbed her and saved her and now she wants to give back. So I think this is going to be a drug rehabilitation center.

It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they all show up. There’s eventually six of them, right? Three couples, um, There’s, there’s, there’s CJ and his wife, Carolyn, who’s also a doctor, but also appears to be psychic because the second she gets into the house, she knows there’s something bad going on there and starts seeing things immediately.

She is not in the house for more than 10 seconds before she sees that ghost and says nothing. I know. I understand that it’s a movie. And I understand that you have to suspend your disbelief. But if I were touring a home, which I’ve done because I’ve, I bought my home. If I were touring a home with my partner and I saw a ghost in there, I would say something,

but I don’t know. She doesn’t. And so they’re all there. And I mean, that’s the setup. It’s the exact same setup as the haunting. Yeah. You know, you have to get a big group of people into this haunted house. So creepy things can start happening to them. And that’s, It’s fine. I just wish there had been more interesting stuff going on.

Todd: Yeah, it’s, it’s, again, it’s just a whole bunch of ominous stuff piled on in the beginning, which just made me chuckle. So she sees this shimmering ghost, without a doubt. They’re talking stories about the house downstairs, and bits of the ceiling start to fall down on CJ, and Oh, hurry up, get out of the way!

Bits that probably wouldn’t harm him much, but they’re falling on him. And then she wanders out into the driveway, which is circular, and there’s this statue on there that looks, you know, it’s got kind of a gargoyle type guy sitting on it, and she reads the inscription, Disturb not he who is here. And then later, you know, after they decide they’re going to take the house, they’re moving things in two minutes later, she thinks she sees a statue move, you know, by the fireplace.

So, I mean, I was like, okay, there’s a lot of stuff going on here and it’s all, it’s all very familiar. And the other people who joined them, there’s Dwight, who’s, I guess he’s their handyman, who’s going to be really helping fix the contractor. And he’s kind of a cowboy type dude. Pete is the jokester, which I also chuckled about.

You always have to have one in. And then Felicia, like you said, then Mary, she’s the gal with the frizzy hair. And then there’s this other sort of couple, Raymond and Laurie. Raymond is introduced to us as he is lecturing his psychology class. And I guess this is going to be his last lecture because he’s going to go on to greater and better things.

At a university or something like that because he just got his phd. What is he a professor of again? I think it was psychology because he says later that oh you inspired me cj, you know when I was in your class Oh, right, right So all these are either like people that he’s rehabbed or people he’s had associations with and they all seem to deeply respect him And then He’s got this thing going on with one of his students, Lori, which is it’s so funny how lightly it’s played Yeah, because I guess it’s really no big deal, you know, but they play it so

Craig: lightly.

Yeah at the time in one moment They get very flirty at the end of class as everybody else is walking out and then he says something about oh now now We need to be discreet. Well, then they walk out in the hallway and just like start making out And I love it. So like, that’s not discreet. And it’s, it’s just funny to me because I imagine that.

But at that time, it was probably frowned upon, but like, it happened. You know, and I, I had a friend whose mom and dad, the dad was significantly older than her because he was her college professor and they met when she was his student and they got together and got married and had a big family and were happily ever after.

So I’m not necessarily one to judge. I’m just saying that looking through a modern lens. That would be Oh yeah. Probably a little bit more

Todd: than frowned upon. Well, let’s be clear, I mean, it’s just not very professional. I mean, if they’re your literal student in your class, like You know, there’s some conflict of interest there when you got a grade that you got to give this person But right sort of aside from that, I don’t know I know like I think at least three couples who’ve you know met met this way I it doesn’t scandalize me so much anymore, but it’s funny because it’s even it’s even mentioned Like, when everybody’s introducing each other, and he introduces himself and says, and this is Lori, she’s one of my students.

One of them says, Oh, you’re one of those guys, huh? And they all have a chuckle about it. Yeah, they

Craig: all

Todd: laugh. So whatever. They are all just gonna go in and like, work, put their own elbow grease into fixing up this house and make something of it. That is why CJ has assembled everybody here. Is to be part of his business venture, I guess.

Craig: Yeah. And at this point, the ghost, the shimmering white ghost is like trying to warn Caroline. She, he shows her this diary that doesn’t really have an, an enormous diary. Like I, I surely thought it was like a photo album or something. Comically large. Nobody

Todd: would write in a diary. No, it’s not a fricking diary.

It’s a giant book. It’s super thick. It’s the only thing in the house, like literally walking through the house. There’s no furniture in here. There is absolutely nothing until she’s led to this one little room where there’s a desk and plain as day on the desk is this book that is almost as big as the desk itself sitting there.

With a pile of cobwebs and dust on it that she has to blow off. And once she does and opens it up, the fireplace lights up behind her. And she gets a vision of somebody hammering a cross on an anvil. Like, was that supposed to be like, a blacksmith that at one time was in that room, like, using that fireplace to craft?

Craig: It just now occurred to me when you said that, I bet that whoever that was was making that cross. Yeah. Is that what you were sa Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, making that cross. I did not put that together when I watched it. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, no, I, cause somehow I was just like, what is happening? Like, why is there a guy with an anvil all of a sudden?

Todd: Well, I mean, I think the cross was referenced at some point, because I did have that thought at that moment, but my other thought was, was this at one time the blacksmith’s room? Cause it sure doesn’t look like

Craig: it. No, I don’t know. It was very odd. I keep trying to get to the inciting incident, which is the first weird thing that happens that they’re all aware of is the dog kind of freaks out.

They hear it howling in the basement and it’s, we see it. It’s like digging at something and then it starts howling and they’re looking for it and they find it in the basement, but it attacks its owner and then runs off. I think it’s at that point that CJ and Caroline, maybe, I don’t remember, where the dog was digging, they find like a trap door.

It’s bolted with this ornate iron cross, and they pull the cross out so that it’s, you know, it’s not bolted closed anymore. But they can’t get it open. But as soon as they walk away, it like supernaturally explodes open and all this steam comes out and that’s when the big earthquake is and all of the doors slam and all of the bars like slam down on the windows and they’re, they’re trapped in there and they can’t get out.

And the rest of it is them trying to figure out how to get out while, Individually dealing with supernatural things that are going on. Yes. And we already talked about Felicia, you know, and what happens to her. What are some of the things? That happened to the other people. I don’t remember. Dwight’s one of the first to go.

Now he goes during the earthquake, doesn’t he? Shortly thereafter. I think it’s during the earthquake and electrical cord like falls from the ceiling and he tries to grab it like a snake or something, but somehow it manages to twine itself all around him. Yeah. Yeah. And he gets electrocuted. I thought it was hilarious because in the aftermath of the, uh, Earthquake, everybody’s running around to look and see if everybody’s okay.

And somebody comes into the room where Felicia is like, just, you know, regaining consciousness of the stairs and dead Dwight is right there. And the character is like, Oh no, well, he’s

Todd: dead. That’s the other thing that took it out of it for me. And again, this is in so many movies, right? Where like people’s friends are dying all around them.

And yet, it’s immediately after they discover the body, the next scene is they’re all sitting contemplatively around a fireplace, talking about what, you know, their next steps are gonna be, and everyone’s calm and collected, and it’s like, wouldn’t you be freaking out just a little bit more, successively, throughout all this?

And I read that this movie was shot in like, 30 days, and I thought, this movie feels like it could’ve almost been shot over a couple weekends, because half of the movie is just dialogue that takes place While these people are in the same scene standing around a fire. As though nothing has just happened, just talking calmly and collectively, it’s like that, Well, I don’t know what it could be.

Well, I think it might be supernatural. No, doctor, how could you believe in the supernatural? We know there’s gotta be a logical explanation for all of this. And like, this back and forth discussion, it always comes back to that. They find a body, they find something’s happened to somebody, they’re back there by that fireplace.

It’s really kind of amusing. There’s a lack of emotion, and, and like CJ himself has got, a serious lack of emotion. I feel like his whole staff could have died off before he looked concerned and worried.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, they want to get out. I mean, they do. I don’t know. Caroline is constantly saying, there’s something in the house.

It’s not the house, there’s something in the house. I feel it. Nobody listens to her. Lori. Who is the student girlfriend at one point panics when everything gets locked up and she’s like Like and she just got ridiculously hysterical and I was so excited because I just knew knew what was coming Yeah, I have seen this setup.

I have seen this woman getting hysterical in this way

Clip: Look

at me. It’s all darling. It’s all right.

Craig: I knew he was gonna slap the shit out of her He did And it was actually shocking in how violent it was. Oh, I know. I expected him to slap her, but he did. And I feel like she comes back and there’s a big red mark on her face. And it unsettled me a little bit, to be frank, even though I had expected that.

I, I had expected it to be almost like, Comic yeah as those scenes often play out. I mean obviously different sensibilities striking a woman isn’t funny But that that was a comic trope, you know The the only way to calm the frantic woman was to yeah slapper or throw water in her face

Todd: Which then instantly calms her Right, she’s fine dead of making her more angry So the shutters as you said before all the shutters shut And, you know, by themselves, and we’ve already noticed that there are bars and doors over everything, the bars over all the windows, the doors lock by themselves, they can’t get through them, Pete picks up a folding table and tries to smash it through a window, and just gets blown back by an unseen force, him and the table just go flying, and then he stands up like, well, that was weird.

You know, and they kind of try these kinds of things, but there’s this force acting again to kind of jerk them around. Oh, and it starts raining outside. So it’s, it’s storming

Craig: and they can’t get out, but they try different things to get out. Like at one point. CJ and Pete, the goofy one, somehow access some, like, copula or something that’s open air.

And they find some rope, and they’re gonna climb down it, which should be fine, right? Except, Pete goes first, and he gets halfway down. And just starts swinging around wildly. Yeah, I know. Was that like the wind or something? I couldn’t figure that out at all. And I was also thinking like, if you’re, if something is swinging you around, what, like, just keep going down, like go faster, like you’re getting closer to the ground all the time, just keep going.

Slide down that rope. But instead he starts to try to climb back up and CJ tries to pull him up. But then I guess the rope. Gets really hot and then Pete just bursts into flame. Yes. Burst into

Todd: flame and falls to the ground. I was like, was it, did I miss something? Was there saw a lightning strike? Was this an electrical cable?

No, he just burst into flame

Craig: and burst into flame and he falls and dies.

Todd: I was really surprised we lost our jokester so early. You know, he only got one. Hilarious gag in earlier, pretending that he was hung by a noose in a room. Hung

Craig: himself. Oh

Todd: my god.

Craig: And you know, when they opened the door and it was the jump scare of him hanging and they freaked out, it was a nice jump scare, but I knew immediately it was a joke.

Oh yeah. But before he revealed it, I knew it was a joke. You used to see this, like, whoever would think that was funny, but then also during this scene on the rope, I thought it was such a missed opportunity that he didn’t get hung. Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. It would have been ironic, right? Like, the

Craig: rope should have supernaturally wrapped around his neck and he got hung there.

I know, I know. Like, haha, shows you for whatever.

Todd: I thought the same thing. And

Craig: then I think Felicia gets assaulted, I don’t know. At some point, Mary goes to get Towels or something and she gets attacked by her dog again Yeah Which pushes her over a stair rail and they both fall to their death and then somebody gets the genius idea that because There’s a lightning storm and because there are iron bars on the windows They can set up wires to electrocute the whole house And melt the bars?

Todd: Oh my god. Is that what

Craig: he said?

Todd: It was the dumbest plan. Because he saw loads of lightning rods on the scene. Like, what? You’re gonna hope that lightning strikes these lightning rods? You’re gonna divert the electricity to these bars so that when it gets there, it’s gonna melt them? Yeah, it was dumb. They noticed the generator’s working.

And so they grabbed some power tools. And. I think it’s Raymond who tries to saw through the door with a circular saw. But it’s like the door is suddenly made of steel or something because they’re like, oh, like, this is grinding the teeth right down on the circular saw, that’s crazy. While the other two are going to get cables and trying to attach them to that.

Raymond, suddenly, as he’s trying to saw through the door again, and he’s suddenly compelled to saw through his whole hand? I was very confused by that. Yeah, it’s like he looks like in his head he’s getting a little dazed or something. And we see a close up of that saw go through his entire hand. Am I wrong about this?

Craig: No, I think you’re right. I, I think that we were to believe that he was in some way compelled to do it. But that’s just odd because we never really see anything else. Like that. Mary’s corpse reanimates. Mary’s corpse reanimates very briefly. Like it just sits up long enough to scare Felicia. It does nothing else.

She backs into the electrified bar. Yes. She, so Felicia, so Felicia dies that way. And then at some point. Caroline gets possessed by the ghost, but that’s, that’s a different type of thing. This seems like mental suggestion. I wasn’t sure. This is one of the only gore effects we get. The saw kind of goes over his hand.

It looks like it saws all the way through his hand, but then they bandage him up and he’s fine.

Todd: Yeah. Well, even in the, in the wide shot or the medium shot, it’s just, he’s got blood all over his hand. Yeah. From what I saw, it looks like half his hand should be gone.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. The, but as I was. You know, scratching my head about whether or not he was somehow influenced to do that.

I thought, it doesn’t matter because that was bound to happen either way. Right. He was, he was using that circular saw on a surface that wasn’t giving. The tiniest, tiniest of slips would send that thing flying. And you would certainly cut your hand off. Yes,

Todd: exactly.

Craig: Well, I’m not, you know, Gosh, craftsmen, but most of my friends were theater majors, and so they all had to take stagecraft and the most important thing in building stagecraft or otherwise is safety.

And that, it was just stupid.

You’re gonna

Todd: cut a hand off, and he did. We missed one bit that I, that I wanted to mention. Caroline wakes up. Okay, this is before. Everything gets wired up and Felicia dies and Ray cuts his hand, I think. Or maybe it’s after he cuts his hand, but it’s before she dies and before the other kid, the other woman, Mary, sits up.

CJ notices that Mary’s body is gone somewhere. Carolyn wakes up and sees that shimmering figure gesturing at a cross by the fireplace. And he just beckons her to one room and into another room and she follows him into this giant room. Where all of the others are creepily just sort of standing around Mary like they moved her body there And now they’re just looking down at it.

And then I have no idea what was happening in this scene Yeah, what was this all about? CJ spins around and suddenly he’s very hairy He’s got bushy eyebrows and maybe his beard is bigger or something. He looks like the guy from Witch Board

Craig: Yes, the guy at the end of Witch Board.

Todd: Dude, that was exactly what I was thinking She holds up the cross and you can’t do this Well, do what?

What were they doing? I have no idea. Which blows them all back and away across the floor. And then, she’s like, Fight back! Fight back! And he grabs her, and is like, choking her or something, and she’s struggling to get out, and pulls him in front of a mirror, and then he looks in the mirror and gets freaked out, and then the mirror breaks.

And then, they’re back by the fire, calmly chatting again. Was that a vision? I have no idea. Yeah, that was bizarre.

Craig: No, I, that, that reminded me of Gothic. Oh yeah, we’re, the whole

Todd: movie is just visions, really. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know. So the Vargas ghost appears to Carolyn and points it across and then they disappear.

Carolyn says to CJ, you’re the one he wants. There has to be a key to this prison so they go to the diary and in the diary now It says something like there’s an angel with a key and a chain and he laid his hand on the devil and bound him for a Thousand years. I know.

Todd: And I’m like, oh my god, is this really, are we dealing with actual Satan here?

Is that what this is

Craig: gonna be? God at some point Ray, Ray somehow gets out like there’s a broken window or something and he gets out But then he just gets That was so weird. Outdoors. It was weird. He runs,

Todd: he breaks through the window, he runs out, he’s like, I’m free, I’m free! And he wanders into the middle of that, instead of to the car or anywhere else, he wanders into the middle of that thing and then it’s like quicksand.

Again, reminded me of Nancy trying to get away from Freddy on the staircase. I don’t know. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Just, he starts falling into goop and then it just takes him down until he’s gone. So it’s quicksand in the yard now.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: And then the window seals itself back up again. Oh man.

Craig: And that’s when Caroline literally gets possessed.

Like the Vargas ghost sits down in her lap, I feel like, all Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Swayze style, and like takes her over and. says that he sacrificed the caretaker to scare them away. So he was the one that killed the caretaker. That was very nice. But then he says, you released the evil when you opened that door.

So you have to return the beast to the pit and then never disturb this place again. And so they try to go to the basement, but like the wind tries to keep them out and they try to close the pit door, but there’s more wind. And then she just falls in. I was like, guys. Be careful.

Todd: I honestly wasn’t expecting that.

I mean falling in the big smoking pit that I figured led to hell like, oh, okay This is going somewhere. And he jumps in after her. It’s like, oh. I

Craig: know and I was, I was, you know, Like, I don’t know if he could see her fine, but if that were me and that was like a pit to hell I’d be like, I guess she’s gone.

Sorry. I’ll still try to seal the door. Yeah, I’ll do my best! But he jumps in too, and somehow they lost the cross, and then He walks into a big white stone room. I read that there was originally a different ending, or they had planned a different ending, but the studio Wanted the protagonists to literally meet the devil at the end.

So CJ walks into this giant cavernous white room and meets the devil.

Todd: I know.

Craig: Oh boy. I was

Todd: rolling my eyes. And the devil could not be more hammily acted by Victor Buono, who is a hammy actor anyway. We’ve been in a million things, television, movies. I was a big fan of the Batman, the 60s version of Batman that played in reruns.

And he was the King Tut character in that, but he always played these kind of characters. But this guy’s been in Planet of the Apes and what happened to Baby Jane.

Craig: Yeah, I remember him from that, exactly. He was Jane’s smarmy a companyist that she hired out of the newspaper who kept assuring her that, you know, they were going to be, she was going to be famous again.

It was really, if I remember correctly, it was really just kind of out of his morbid, like he was just taking advantage of her, but I definitely remember him from that, but he’s just goofy. And I just don’t understand the problem that I have with it is just, it doesn’t fit tonally with the rest of the movie.

No. All of a sudden. It kind of feels like a Mel Brooks comedy. And I actually would find that hilarious if it were kind of a horror comedy and then you get to the end and the devil’s just kind of this goofy guy who is just messing with you and laughing at you from afar. But here it just, it just seems stupid.

Clip: What is it

Craig: you

Clip: want from me? My

Craig: accounts.

Clip: I fill my accounts. You have a will, Mr. Arnold. Strong, sometimes misdirected, but a will. So you have some value, even among your kind. By the way, where is that piece of holy excrement? Your cross. It’s a thing of God. How could it come here? Don’t question me. I have little enough patience.

Craig: One of the things that I did like, I don’t know, he starts, like, taunting CJ and telling him it’s all his fault, and One of the things that I did like about this scene is that the devil’s look, like, he just, he looks a little bit jovial at first, But his look becomes more sinister. Yeah. They do more sinister makeup on him.

Cut away in more makeup and cut away in more makeup. Over the brief three or four minutes, That he’s in the movie because this is at the very end like I’m watching this and all this is happening And there’s like five minutes Yeah And the devil wants the cross and he’s kind of fighting with CJ and then out of nowhere Carolyn shows up and stabs the devil with the cross.

Yes, and they run away. They run away But she takes after she stabs him I guess she pulls it back out of him and takes it and so they get out and they seal the door up Again with the cross and as soon as the door is sealed the house Opens back up. The doors fly open, the, the bars fly up, the, you know, the shades open.

And again, like I said, just like at the end of Troll, they emerge from the building, into the sunrise, they embrace. They get into their car to drive away. Ghost Vargas waves at them from the window. Yes. The end. Oh god.

Todd: Oh

Craig: god, this

Todd: movie.

Craig: Ha

Todd: ha ha ha ha. I don’t know. I mean, that’s the problem. They should not have had to meet the devil.

That was a producer mistake. I just feel like the devil can do anything. If the cross is lost, the cross is lost. Just, when you introduce the devil as your protagonist, physically in front of you, you don’t escape that, you know? You don’t sneak around behind him and grab the cross when he’s not looking and stab him.

He doesn’t even need the frickin cross. Like, why, just go. The door’s open, it’s been open for the duration of the movie. He could have just left. He didn’t need to hang out down there any longer. I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t really get it. It’s dumb.

Craig: Initially it was just supposed to be some demonic force.

And I think that that would be better because this is, you know, silly, but there’s that old phrase. Which is better, the devil you know or the devil you don’t know. If you’re gonna go with the devil you know, in a horror movie, it better be really good. And there are times that I’ve seen that, like, the one that always pops to mind, to me, is, and I don’t know if this is technically supposed to be Satan, but certainly a devilish figure, but Tim Curry in Legend.

Right. If you, if you’re gonna go, Devil go, devil,

Todd: that’s badass.

Craig: I think I’ve seen other effective ones too, but I think that I would be more frightened by something unknown, something original, or with its own lore, whether it be actual lore or just movie lore. I think that would be scary. There’s somebody in the credits on IMDB credited as the demon.

I don’t have any idea who or what that was.

Todd: No. I don’t either. I just, uh, what, really, like, in the 1800s, this guy named Vargas built a giant house and managed to seal the devil in the basement, just with a little cross that could be dug up, and then he gets unleashed, and all he does is mess around with the people in the house for a while, but then he gets bested, and this Dinky little cross like closes the seal and now we’re without the devil for a while for

Craig: another thousand years There’s there’s a whole thing What’s her name Caroline reads something about how?

Somebody you know trapped him for a thousand years, but when the thousand years comes he’ll be back You know, we talked about this in such a disjointed way. I’m afraid this is going to be really boring. Right. As I really kind of found the movie, I, when you suggested it, I was pleased to see that it was only an hour and 24 minutes long.

And I can’t say that it felt that long. Oftentimes I say, Oh my gosh, this hour and a half movie felt like three hours. This wasn’t like that. It didn’t feel super long. I just wasn’t particularly interested. No. And so. I just kind of kept wishing it was over. Once again, I took a break in the middle and took like a two hour nap and then I got back up and finished it.

I didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t recommend searching it out. You can find something better.

Todd: Yeah, I mean, it’s not terrible. We’ve seen Movies. And we’ve seen a lot of movies like this. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with doing a Haunted House movie. They’ve all got the same tropes and things like that. And, all right, you want to throw the devil in there?

Fine. It was just, it was just so disjointed and unfocused and ultimately not satisfying. And you could kind of tell it wasn’t going to be.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

Todd: About halfway through just because it was so derivative and so eye rolling. That I can’t imagine anyone being terribly emotionally invested in it and therefore very freaked out by it.

Craig: Plus, it’s not very scary. No. It’s not very funny. There are moments, like that, the earthquake moment, that border on so bad it’s funny, but that one scene is not enough to save it.

Todd: Well, I say, don’t watch this, watch this, like, Don’t watch this movie. You want to see a highly entertaining Haunted House movie from around the same time period.

See, Amityville 2, The Possession, way better vibes and feel and way more fun. And Raymond from this movie was Father Tom in that film.

Craig: Well, and I feel like, I mean, it’s been, it’s been so long since we talked about it, and I haven’t watched it since, but if you’re looking for like a funny kind of thing.

Bloodbath at the house of death. Oh yeah.

Todd: That’s total comedy.

Craig: That was really goofy and fun and funny and, and kind of, kind of with the same vibe, but it leans into the humor. And I enjoyed that movie. I had a good time with that movie. This one. I, uh, I could have passed. Yeah. I, I would, I would, I, I don’t feel more complete having seen it.

I it’s, it’s completely unmemorable. Five days from now, I’ll remember nothing about it.

Todd: Right. Of course. We’ll be comparing other movies to it. It’ll be a benchmark for us for a while and not in a good way. I’m glad we watched it, though, because I’ve been intensely curious about it for decades, so, um, I’m glad we finally got to see it.

Kind of sad to see how disappointing it is, but not altogether surprised, either. Heh heh heh heh. Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can find us online just by googling Two Guys in a Chainsaw podcast. Let us know what Haunted House movies you love and you’d like to see us, uh, review.

Uh, you can find us at any one of our places online, uh ChainsawHorror. com, Facebook, Twitter. Leave us a review wherever you listen to our podcast. That’s one of the best things you can do to help spread the word.

Craig: You should check out the new design at ChainsawHorror. com because Todd’s been working really hard on it, and it’s really cool.

Oh, thanks,

Todd: Greg. We’ve got some nice little cartoonish representations of us that may or may not be accurate. I love it. You gave me way more hair, and I love it. Sometimes I like cartoon me a lot better than me. Our patrons know for sure, though, we go behind the scenes with them. We do video chats with them.

We got a Christopher Pike book club still going strong, but we do a lot of fun things for our patrons. And if that is something that you’re interested in being a part of. Patreon. com slash Chainsaw Podcast, just five bucks a month gets you access to minisodes and all the fun stuff that happens behind the scenes over there.

Until next time, I’m Todd, and I’m Craig, with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.

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