Time for another Wretched Wednesday down in The Dungeon!
Tonight's feature is a made for TV movie from 1970 called
"The House That Would Not Die!"
So after about two hours of research or one Google search, I came up with this little bit of information about movies that were made for TV. The first one was called "The Killers," and starred Lee Marvin and included Ronald Reagan, but it was deemed to be too violent for television, so they released it to movie theaters instead, so the first made for TV movie that actually aired on television was "See How They Run" starring John Forsyth and Senta Berger! Both of those movies came out in 1964!
Nice lady and her nice niece move into old haunted Southern country home!
Whoa! Pretty scary!
Nope! It's just Richard Egan as the neighbor fellah!
The nice lady was Barbara Stanwyck! So what we have here is a movie length TV show which is basically a combination of "Empire/Redigo" starring Richard Egan, and "The Big Valley" starring Barbara Stanwyck but with a mildly scary story line!
When TV movies started coming on television back in the 60's, we used to avoid them like the plague, because with TV censorship, there could be no cussing, no sex, no real slashing or bashing, and in a nutshell, they were just generally boring compared to the real thing. Watching "The House That Would Not Die" has not changed my opinion one iota!
This is what they considered to be violent and scary!
They paid Richard Egan an extra 13 bucks for his ability to give the look!
They had a scary seance scene that made Ed Wood's "Night Of The Ghouls" seem downright exciting, and that's not easy to do!
The Director of Cinematography must have been Arty Shatz!
Michael (Logan's Run) Anderson Jr. has the part of the young man who looks like this!
Kitty Winn's first role ever was in this movie as a possessed person. I guess it prepared her pretty good for her parts in "The Exorcist," and "Exocist II."
Richard Egan also gets a little possesed, and that's about it!
For me, The End couldn't come soon enough, but the good news is that it's not titled "The Movie That Would Not Die!"
If you really like your action to move at the pace of a soap opera, then you might really enjoy "The House That Would Not Die" a lot, but if you don't, then a nap might be much more exciting!
2 comments:
I'm glad you mentioned that "look" that Richard Egan gives when he possessed. It makes you think that he could've done pretty well for himself playing scary characters.
Richard Egan was a rugged, good looking guy, but yeah, he could be pretty scary looking when he wanted to. Thanx Grant!
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