Burnt Offerings (1976)

It's The Shining before there was The Shining: a star-studded movie released in 1976, one year earlier than Stephen King's brick, about a writer (Oliver Reed), his wife (Karen Black) and their young son (Lee Montgomery) - oh, and Bette Davis as an aunt - who move into a holiday retreat (a summer rental too good and cheap to be true, not a hotel) and fall victim to strange goings-on - weirdness that probably stems from upstairs where the mysterious octogenarian Mrs Allardyce resides behind a closed door - but in this movie, the effect of this paranormality upon the family is just a whole lot of family bickering - whose dad hasn't played too rough with them in a pool? - and it doesn't just affect dad but first dad, then dad and mum, and then, weirdly, just mum who becomes house-obsessed - dad for some reason gets a reprieve - and then poor Bette Davis' aunt becomes ill...and all this not very scintillating stuff - fights then remorse then fights then remorse -  never ends up making a word of sense, so in that respect too Burnt Offerings is very much like The Shining.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None) (1974)

An Agatha Christie adaptation, Ten Little Indians (or less controversially, And Then There Were None) has ten individuals including Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, and a singing, piano-playing Charles Aznavour gather in a remote Iranian desert mansion (not the book's island off the Devon coast) summoned by a mysterious host and, from their first tension-filled dinner, these guests are picked off one-by-one by a killer whose identity and motives are the surprise revelation at film's end.

★★★★☆

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