House of Secrets (1936)

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

When the new owner of Hawk's End, a property bequeathed to him in a will, visits the ramshackled house for the first time, he is told by a gun-wielding man and a mysterious blonde to leave and never return, but he repetitively goes back, each time to be told again by the gun-wielding man and the mysterious blonde never to go back, while inbetween times, he and his gumshoe friend postulate explanations for this peculiar state of affairs including the theory the house harbours a three-fingered fugitive on the run, is home to a long-lost pirate treasure, has been set up as a base for a government conspiracy, houses a murderer or, even more ridiculously, that all of these things are true, revealed in the really very silly plot's final ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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The House of Fear (1945)

As in Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips, the arrival of a series of envelopes containing orange pips portends the grisly death of each recipient but where there are three deaths in the Openshaw family in the short story, there is a body count of seven in this film - a lot for a movie with a runtime of 69 minutes - and although it's good fun and Basil Rathbone is Sidney Paget's illustration of Sherlock Holmes come-to-life, and although the movie is deliciously spooky and the murders unspeakably gruesome - details that murder mystery fans will relish - the rush of deliveries of 'orange pip letters' one after the other after the other to a diminishing group of members of the Good Comrades Club seated night after night at their dining table in the gothic Drearcliff House gets a touch repetitive and ridiculous after, say, the first three.

★★★★☆

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The Glass House (2001)

A really excellent thriller about a newly orphaned heir to a fortune, possibly the target of a foster parents' murder plot, is Mary Stewart's Nine Coaches Waiting, a book I ripped through on the beach last summer, but this thriller, with its moribund first thirty minutes and a garbled plot about villainous foster parents who get their comeuppance even before they've realised their villainy and coordinated their dastardly plot, stars Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgård as the impossibly beset foster parents and a stony Leelee Sobieski as the never-really-imperilled foster teenager.

★☆☆☆☆

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House of the Disappeared (시간위의 집) (Siganwiui Jib) (2017)

I can't vouch for the source material, a Venezuelan horror that took the world by storm in 2013, but this 2017 South Korean remake about a woman who returns after 25 years of incarceration to the house where her husband was one night stabbed to death and her son inexplicably disappeared through a blocked basement doorway is appealing because it stars Kim Yun-jin from Lost (she was the deeply likeable Sun) and because, in the end, after a really very silly story plays out (in a distinctly low budget way with made-for-tv quality make-up and zero special effects), this supernatural mystery thriller manages to be surprisingly, ridiculously touching.

★★☆☆☆

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White House Down (2013)

Sometimes romantic lead, sometimes teen heartthrob, sometimes dancing sex symbol, sometimes powerhouse dramatic actor, here the versatile Channing Tatum tries his hand at the John McClane role in a Die Hard clone set in a besieged White House, but he is not exactly the centre of attention - there are too many other characters vying unsuccessfully for that, including Jamie Foxx as the POTUS requiring extraction from the hostage situation - and so with your focus divided across myriad players, and further distracted by ill-timed bursts of humour during the high action, you never care what happens but can at least enjoy the audacious sight of the President in his limousine doing doughnuts on the South Lawn while shooting a missile launcher.

★★☆☆☆

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Crooked House (2017)

Given it is beautifully acted, beautiful to look at, and faithful to its source material, perhaps the reason this Agatha Christie adaptation underwhelms has to do with the story itself, about a Greek business mogul murdered in his mansion full of oddbod family members - they are all grotesque and the solution renders a lot of what has come before rather extraneous..

★★★☆☆

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Big Momma's House (2000)

"Honky Grandma Be Trippin'" for realsies has Martin Lawrence playing the undercover cop who thinks the best way to inveigle his way into a wanted criminal's circle is to use a leftover The Klumps bodysuit to disguise himself as a large Southern grandmother, which seems a lot more work than simply developing the chemistry he finds he has as himself with the gangster's girlfriend.

★☆☆☆☆

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In The House (2012)

A French literature teacher enters into the thrall of a talented writer when a student starts submitting for correction excerpts of a work-in-progress, but his story is sinister, the student's motivation in telling the story is mysterious, and pretty soon author, reader, characters and story are all vying for creative control in François Ozon's initially intriguing drama that quickly becomes laboured as characters start behaving in farcical, theatrical rather than sinister Hitchcockian ways.

★★☆☆☆

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The Last House on the Left (2009)

Teenagers are raped and stabbed by a depraved trio and it falls to the parents of one of the teenagers to revenge the crime in this Funny Games-wannabe that artlessly strings together scene after scene of brutality - the movie treads water and the actors wallow with nothing meaningful to do between all the head-smashing, -hammering, -shooting, -microwaving. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Key House Mirror (Nøgle hus spejl) (2015)

In this really impressive, tender, funny but oh-so-heart-breaking portrait of old age, a physically able and independent woman (beautifully played by Denmark's answer to Judi Dench, Ghita Norby) finds love in a trumpet-playing gent in the next room of a facility where she is caring for her husband, and though it seems only natural she seeks out physical and emotional contact given her husband's near catatonic state and given her loneliness living among the facility's doddery old residents, her romance raises eyebrows and for more reasons than she realises.

★★★★★

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House of Wax (1953)

This 1953 horror mystery starring Vincent Price, a remake of the 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum, is preoccupied with getting all it can out of its state-of-the-art 3D technology and so features drawn out scenes like one of a high-kick cabaret dance and another featuring a street performer doing odd things with three ping pong bats and balls, which show-off the 3D tech but add nothing to the horror and mystery involving body snatching, murder, and a hideous figure stalking through the shadows of NYC, and so this reviewer prefers the 1933 original!

★★★☆☆

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