The Horror of It All (1964)

When I reviewed The Gorgon as part of my Hammer-Thon October Fest, I noted how it marked director Terence Fisher's return to Hammer after having not worked for them for two years following three box-office disappointments in a row. During that period, Fisher did find other work, but it wasn't on movies he was proud of or had nice memories of. One of them was this horror-comedy starring Pat Boone, and if you'd never heard of it before you read that review, or possibly up until this very moment, you're not alone. I never knew this thing existed until I read Wheeler Winston Dixon's book, The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer Horror and Beyond, in preparation for that series, and when I described its premise to a friend of mine, he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Though he never checked it out, despite his curiosity, when I decided on this year's theme, I figured The Horror of It All, if nothing else, would make for an interesting and, what's more, very rare item to talk about, as to this day, it's never been released on any home video formats, including VHS! Think about this: Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, the, by all accounts, disastrous West German/Italian/French co-production Fisher directed in 1962, has gotten a Blu-Ray release as part of the Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee set, but The Horror of It All has nothing. However, fortunately for me (or unfortunately, however you want to look at it), you can find it online, as there are rips of television airings, such as one time it played on the Fox Movie Channel, on streaming sites like Internet Archive. When I found such an upload, I went into the movie with some trepidation, as Dixon did not pull any punches in his very low opinion of it, describing it as, "Really not a Fisher film at all, but rather a vehicle for the dubious talents of Pat Boone," and later adding, "Boone is abominable. He smugly mocks the conventions of the horror film, yet he lacks (as the other performers in the film make painfully clear) the requisite skill for even the frothiest of comedy roles." Coupled with the knowledge that Fisher took this gig purely as a paycheck and often called it the worst movie he ever made, I was horrified and thought this thing was going to be totally unbearable.

Make no mistake, though, while I can't really say it's good, it's not as hard to sit through as something like Hillbillys in a Haunted House (check in tomorrow to see me suffer from that piece of shit). Rather, The Horror of It All is just very mediocre. It's another "old dark house" type of movie about an American guy stuck in a creepy old mansion in the middle of nowhere with a bizarre, quirky family and the trials and tribulations he goes through. In fact, it is very much something of a companion piece to William Castle's The Old Dark House, released the previous year, and is only slightly better, in my opinion (just a warning: there will be plenty of comparisons between the two films). Given the choice, I still don't know which one I'd rather watch (though, I might say this because it's mercifully short; just 72 minutes), but I will say that, while not great at all, Pat Boone is an okay lead, the film's technical aspects are competent enough, and the music, particularly the title song Boone sings at one point, is fairly catchy.

John J. "Jack" Robinson, an American encyclopedia salesman working in London, drives out deep into the English countryside one night in order to visit his fiance, Cynthia Marley, at her family's isolated mansion. Upon arrival, Jack's car breaks down and when he tries to push it along, it crashes into a ravine, forcing him to walk the rest of the way. Arriving at the house, where he's fired upon by a special "doorbell" meant to keep away intruders, Jack meets Cynthia's uncle, Reginald, and then meets with Cynthia herself. He's come in order to receive her uncle's consent to their marriage, but learns he's picked an awkward time to do so, as one of Cynthia's cousins, Creighton, has just died from an apparent illness. Regardless, Jack intends to stay, get Reginald's consent, and immediately return to London in order to get married. During his first night at the house, wherein he discovers a tarantula in his bed, Jack meets another of Cynthia's cousins, Cornwallis, a Shakespearean actor, who tells him he believes Creighton was actually murdered and that the tarantula was meant for him, as Jack is staying in his room. The next morning at breakfast, Jack meets Cynthia's other cousin, the vampire-like Natalia, and Percival, her elderly, inventor uncle. Jack then takes the opportunity to ask Reginald for his permission and he agrees that his and Cynthia should get married... eventually. After he tells Jack of the Marley family's sordid and macabre history, they all have a toast to Creighton, after which Cornwallis suddenly drops dead, his drink having apparently been poisoned. It's then clear that there is, indeed, a killer among them, and with no phones or automobiles, and the nearest police station being twenty miles away, Jack must try to survive and uncover the identity of the culprit, who begins targeting him as well.

While Terence Fisher was never the kind of auteur director who developed his own projects, he still was often able to bring enthusiasm and considerable directorial skill to the films he made, especially when he found his niche in Hammer's Gothic horror films. However, The Horror of It All was very much a job for hire, as producer Robert Lippert brought Fisher on because they had a short shooting schedule and he was well-known for bringing his movies in on time and budget. As I've said before, Fisher, by all accounts, did not care for this movie at all, and while his directing style was never flashy to begin with, you can tell from the mundane way in which it was shot that he was trying to get through it as quickly and efficiently as possible. The expected result is that it is one of his weakest films, and when asked about it in a 1964 interview, he remarked, "Hardly a horror film, that! It's more of a musical comedy, or rather a musical parody of horror films. Pat Boone stars in it, so... For me, it was really a sort of experiment and I'm not sure whether or not I did a good job with it." Not surprisingly, Fisher never made another musical (I don't know if one song counts this as a musical, but whatever).

While Wheeler Winston Dixon described his performance as "abominable," I more see Pat Boone's performance as serviceable, and I even think he has a bit more charisma than Tom Poston did in The Old Dark House. That said, though, his appearance here wasn't a great coup whatsoever, as his movie career had gone downhill by this point. In any case, he plays the same sort of character as Poston's Tom Penderel: an American salesman living in London who travels to an old mansion in the English countryside, gets stranded, and has to stay there with the resident, quirky family. Rather than bringing his roommate a newly bought car, John J. Robinson, or Jack, goes there in order to meet up with his fiance, Cynthia Marley,  and get her family to consent to their marriage. It starts out rough for him, as he has trouble finding the place, and when he's finally on the right track, his car breaks down and then crashes into a ravine when he tries to push it along. When he first reaches the Marley house, he's fired upon when he rings the doorbell, he then learns that a member of the family has recently died, finds a very unwelcome roommate in the form of a tarantula in his bed, and learns from one of Cynthia's cousins that the deceased was actually murdered, which is all but confirmed when Cornwallis himself drops dead after drinking some poisoned gin. And, worst of all, the nearest police station is twenty miles away, there are no automobiles or telephones at the house, and the annoying booby trap at the front door makes it very hard to leave in one piece. So, between all that and the fact that Jack himself is actively targeted by the murderer, who tries to do him in at one point by luring him into a metal room with a descending ceiling in the conservatory, he's in quite the pickle. Again, there's nothing amazing about Boone's performance but he manages to come off as a decent enough guy who's really out of his depth here, weirded out by the strange family and finding it difficult to get a good night's sleep in their creepy old house. Concerned for Cynthia's safety, he takes it upon himself to unmask the killer, whose motive he learns when she tells him the family fortune comes to $1 million, and I like that he's not as milquetoast and mopey as Poston was. In the end, when things come to a head during a Halloween masquerade party, Jack and Cynthia escape in order to fetch the police, when he learns that the killer might be somebody he would've never expected.

Since it's Pat Boone, they had to have him sing at some point, which he does just a little after the movie's halfway mark. It's the only song in the whole movie and comes out of nowhere when Percival Marley is showing Jack around his laboratory, at his very belated inventions. One of them is a phonograph, on which Percival plays a jaunty little piano tune, and as he listens to it, Jack comes up with a song right on the spot. Said song,

which takes its name from the movie's title, describes the most typical and old-fashioned haunted house tropes, with lyrics like, "When the bats fly free, through the belfry/and I hear quick steps, soft and stealthy/Through a clammy fog, so unhealthy/I feel the horror of it all. Add a doctor mad, I mean ingenious/With his fresh-made lad, Frankenstinious/Vampires eating lunch, intravenous/I feel the horror of it all. When the

spiders crawl, swift and hairy/Through the shadows tall, dark and scary/Just one bite, and o-bituary/I feel the horror of it all." Yeah, it's corny, but it's one of the most memorable and, no lie, enjoyable aspects of the movie to me, as it's just campy and fun, added to by how Boone maneuvers through the set of Percival's lab as he sings, making motions like clutching his suit-jacket to himself as though he were cold, doing the Frankenstein monster walk towards the wall so his shadow looks like the

monster's silhouette, and walking his fingers like a spider across a counter. In the middle of the song, Cynthia enters the room and he pulls her into the song, dancing with her and singing, "No there's just one thing, that can chill me/Nights without your sweet, kiss to thrill me/Life without your love, that could kill me/That would be the horror of it all." Again, not great, but, as I saw someone comment on YouTube, it would make for a nice little ditty on a Halloween playlist.

Much like Cecily Femm in The Old Dark House, Cynthia Marley (Erica Rogers) is the most normal member of the family. As Jack's fiance, she's surprised when he suddenly shows up at the house one night, and has mixed feelings about it, as she's glad to see him and all but he, of course, has come right on the heels of the sudden death of one of her cousins. Moreover, she's very nervous about him coming to personally ask her uncle Reginald for her hand in marriage, mainly because she knows how bizarre, as well as old-fashioned, her family is and is worried about how they'll react to him and his desire to marry her as soon as possible. And then, when they start dying off, she has to face the awful truth that someone in her family is a killer who's trying to bump off the others in order to get the family fortune and tries to help Jack unmask them. By the end of the movie, though, it seems like it's going to go with the exact same revelation as The Old Dark House, as, while they're escaping, Cynthia pulls a gun on Jack. She says she wanted to inherit the money and then marry him, only he spoiled everything by showing up and sticking his nose into the murders, and she also says that, because she's still fond of him, she'll make his death quick and painless. This leads to a struggle for the gun that ends in Jack getting struck over the head with it... only to wake up in the hospital and uncover the real killer. It's then revealed that Cynthia was pretending to be the killer in order to protect Jack and knocked him out so she could go back and warn the rest of the family of his identity. How that was supposed to protect Jack is beyond me, as is why she didn't just tell him so they could both go back and warn the family. And yet, after all that, he still ends up marrying her, whereas I would've washed my hands of her following that moronic little stunt.

Speaking of the real killer, he turns out to be someone who was seemingly dispatched fairly early on: Cynthia's cousin, Cornwallis (Dennis Price). A very haughty Shakespearean actor, Jack first meets him when he freaks out upon finding a tarantula in his bed and he's the one who first suggests there's a killer about, saying someone left the window open to ensure Creighton, who was always in fragile health, would be exposed to the cold night air, as well as that the tarantula was meant for him, as it's his room. He also mentions how strange and sinister his family is as a whole, informing Jack that the tarantula was a specimen in Percival's research and adds to the notion that Natalia might be a vampire, noting that she doesn't drink much, except at night... all with a very laid back, casual air about him. When they have a toast in honor of Creighton, Cornwallis, after adding some sugar to his gin, seems to be hit with pain afterward and drops dead. But, he pops up again at the end of the movie, disguised as a doctor at the hospital and preparing to do Jack in, only for the ring he wears on his finger to give him away. Once he's been found out, he very casually criticizes himself for the ring, saying, "Oh, stupid of me. A flawed performance," and happily explains that the reason why Jack thought he was dead was because there was a drug that slowed down his heart, adding, "Getting out of the crypt was no problem." He makes no attempt to fight against the bobby who comes to take him away, but when Cynthia comments that she may never see him again, he hints that might not be the case, as the very end of the movie does prove.

In yet another parallel between this and The Old Dark House, the head of the Marley family, Reginald (Valentine Dyall), comes off as inviting enough to Jack when he first arrives, but there's definitely an air of menace about him, and it's obvious he's not 100% taken with Jack, either. Unlike Roderick Femm, though, he's much more subtle about it, hinting that he doesn't care for his being an American, and while he doesn't at all object to Jack asking for his consent to marry Cynthia, he adds, "Eventually," citing that the family knows nothing about him and vice versa. After that, Jack proceeds to give a quick rundown of who he is as a person and Reginald, in turn, tells him something of the Marley family's sordid history, specifically how his ancestors died in ways tied to their hobbies and vices, and that the family home is known throughout the countryside as a house of horrors. When someone begins murdering them, he's hardly that concerned or horrified by it, and even goes as far as to suspect Jack, saying he'd rather it be him than a member of his own family. And yet, despite this, when Jack and Cynthia escape to get the police, Reginald suddenly suggests it might be Percival, with him and Natalia threatening him when he, in turn, says it may as well be either of them, too. Incidentally, during the Halloween masquerade party they throw during the climax, Reginald gets to be a bit more flamboyant and overly macabre, saying that downbeat, funeral dirge music you've heard in countless films and cartoons is his absolute favorite tune and that it takes him back to his childhood (which explains a lot).

As odd as the Marleys are, only one of them is possibly supernatural in nature: Natalia (Andree Melly), who may or may not be a vampire. Andree Melly was no stranger to this, as she previously appeared in The Brides of Dracula, where she was seduced and turned into a vampire by Baron Meinster (the whole time I was watching the movie, I knew I'd seen her from something else but couldn't place her until I looked her up; doesn't she kind of look like Barbara Steele in Black Sunday in this movie?). Here, she's much more overtly vampiric in nature: she dresses in black, has dark, stringy hair, is cold to the touch, doesn't drink much except at night, according to Cornwallis, and her favorite type of drink is a Bloody Mary. She also has a very morbid, Goth sort of personality. When she's introduced to Jack and he shakes her hand, he comments, "'Cold hands, warm heart.' That's what they say isn't it?", to which she counters, "Do they, Mr. Robinson? Ha, ha! How wrong can they be?" Later, after Jack has been given one of Cornwallis' suits following his "death," Natalia comments on how good it looks on him, adding that black is her favorite color, and then says, "And soon, the flesh will have rotted off his bones." She also takes an uncomfortable interest in Jack soon after she meets him, and when he comes across her eating some meat with ketchup late one night, she asks him to join her, which he promptly declines. Significantly, she's the only one who can control Muldoon, her raving lunatic of a brother who's kept down in the basement. She says she controls him through "love," but the way she says it suggests something very unsettling and skin-crawling.

Yeah, like Morgan Femm, Muldoon Marley (Archie Duncan) is the resident big, brutish maniac who eventually targets Jack and chases him around the house. However, Muldoon, whose madness is a result of being held captive for two weeks by head-hunters, to the point where he's deluded into thinking his head is shrunken and everyone he sees is a head-hunter, is much more terrifying than Morgan, as he's constantly snarling and growling like an enraged animal. In fact, you hear him long before you first see him, making it seem as though there's some monster down in the basement. He also has a tendency to laugh maniacally as well, especially in one scene where he almost kills Jack up in Percival's laboratory. Speaking of which, Muldoon is so dangerous that he's kept down in a padded cell in the basement, with Natalia being the only one who can interact with him without getting attacked, but during the climax, he's let out of the cell by the real killer and proceeds to chase Jack and then Cynthia. Like Morgan, he's as fast as he is ferocious and is also hard to fend off, being quite impervious to anything thrown at him. However, he's put down when Jack activates Percival's booby-trapped doorbell and is shot in the head, revealing that the blanks have been replaced with real bullets.

Speaking of Percival (Jack Bligh), despite the booby-trap he set at the front door, he's one of the more amiable members of the family. While still an oddball like most of them, he's very friendly towards Jack when he meets him and is absolutely delighted when he wanders into his laboratory, as it gives him a rare chance to show off his inventions. Speaking of which, his research is for a good cause, the betterment of humanity, but the problem is that he's at least fifty years behind with all of his discoveries and creations. For instance, he's "invented" electricity, boasting about a world lit up with electric lights (the Marley house itself doesn't have electricity), and also shows off a "moving photographs" machine and a method he's devised of capturing sounds and the human voice, i.e. a phonograph. Despite his being so ridiculously behind the times, Jack can't bring himself to tell Percival, given how sincere and enthusiastic he is about his work. He actually ends up helping Jack out not once but twice. When Jack is trapped in a metal, compressing room down in the conservatory, Percival heads down there in order to get a plant specimen and manages to save him just in time. Later, near the end of the movie, he devises the "horseless carriage" Jack mentioned to him, giving him and Cynthia a chance to escape to the police. The only downsides are that Percival forgot to install brakes and the thing doesn't get very far before it has a bit of a blowout.

Finally, in something of a nod of the hat to the original Old Dark House from the 30's, upstairs is the family's bedridden Grandpa (Erik Chitty). Unlike the very unsettling, cackling grandfather from that movie, Grandpa Marley is more akin to old Hinchley from The Comedy of Terrors: a senile, hard-of-hearing old man who's oblivious to what's going on due to his isolation and his nearly being stone deaf. He's also shown to be a dirty old fellow, too, as the newspapers he's shown reading are only a cover for the Playboys and other adult magazines he's actually looking at. He's first introduced when Jack and Cynthia go to ask him who would benefit the most from the family being killed off but he's not able to tell them anything because he can barely hear them. Moreover, though he does give Cynthia his blessing in her marriage, Jack accidentally makes a bad first impression, as Grandpa, like Reginald, isn't thrilled at the notion of him being an American, and when he shouts about the family fortune, Grandpa thinks that's all he's interested in and promptly throws him out of the room. The next day, Jack gets a tip that appears to be from Grandpa, telling him to search the small museum in the conservatory, which leads to him nearly getting crushed in the trap room. Because of that, Jack briefly thinks he's the one who's killing the family off (despite his clearly being too frail and bedridden to do so), but when he goes up there to confront him about it, he finds he's dead, as somebody put his vital medicine out of his reach. 

Though likely just a weird coincidence, as it was hardly the type of rollicking success that would inspire others to rip it off, it is amazing how many similarities there are between this and William Castle's The Old Dark House. So many, in fact, that, when I was planning to revisit them for these reviews, I was getting some of their specific plot elements mixed up. Besides the basic plot and setting, there are other correlations regarding the characters, in addition to the ones I've already mentioned. Natalia

is akin to Morgana Femm given her interest in Jack and her connection to the big, burly madman who ends up chasing him around, whereas Percival is a lot like Potiphar in how he tends to separate himself from the others in order to work on some project in secret. Let's also not forget that, like Potiphar, Percival has booby-trapped the house's front door, causing Jack a lot of literal headaches when he tries to go for the police, at one point

leading him to get knocked senseless and wind up bedridden back in his room. Like in that movie, each death is often followed by a specific occurrence, in this case, someone hanging a bust of the deceased up on a wall. And, also concerning the murder mystery, there are plenty of suspects to go around, with Jack himself becoming one in the eyes of Reginald (here, it's not mentioned that the first victim died before he arrived), and when the final act starts to wind down, it seems like it's going to go the exact same route and have the main character's love interest end up being the killer, only for it to pull the rug out from under you again.

What mainly distinguishes The Horror of It All from The Old Dark House is its tone and humor. It's much, much subtler and nowhere near as farcical, with Pat Boone being a somewhat stronger lead and the family, while still coming off as odd and sinister, not being as overtly quirky and weird. Moreover, while its sense of humor is sometimes quite dark and macabre, it doesn't make a joke out of the murders of the family members. They're played straight, with none of the deaths occurring

through crazy, over-the-top means or dying with exaggerated expressions on their faces, their deaths are taken more seriously by the family, and once they're dead, their corpses aren't used in any ghoulish physical comedy. Instead, the comedy comes mainly from Jack's dealing with the weird situation he's in, be it getting creeped out by Natalia, getting chased around by Muldoon, finding a tarantula in his bed, or getting knocked unconscious by the booby-trapped front door. Also,

as you'd expect, there's humor in how odd some of the family members are, like Cornwallis and his Shakespearean actor attitude about everything, even after he's been unmasked as the killer at the end, Natalia's morbid, Goth-like personality and the question of whether or not she's an actual vampire, and Percival's seriously out of date inventions. And while it leads to the revelation that the family and house have a local reputation of

being cursed (not that that matters much in the long run), the history of the past Marleys is darkly funny in that their deaths came about through something they were into: an avid horseman was trampled to death, a devoted scholar accidentally locked himself in his study and starved to death, and a beloved hostess ended up poisoning herself and her dinner guests when she unknowingly used toadstools in her special sauce.

Save for a scant handful of location work, like the opening when Jack drives through London and out into the countryside, and the exterior shots of the Marley house (which I initially thought were shots of the frequently used Oakley Court but I now think is a similar-looking but different building), the movie was shot entirely at Shepperton Studios, on sets created by Harry White. Unfortunately, as fairly dime-a-dozen and lackluster as the sets in The Old Dark House were, there's even less to say

about the art direction for the Marley house interiors, as they're not rundown and, therefore, don't have much character to them. They look fine enough, and are helped immensely by Arthur Lavis' black-and-white cinematography and the low lighting in the nighttime scenes due to the place not having any electricity, but they're fairly "meh" overall. The foyer looks pretty good, decorated with large candelabras, a lantern on a small table, and a memorable black-and-white tiled

floor, and the same goes for the upstairs, decorated with more candelabras and portraits. The bedroom that Jack stays in, which is actually Cornwallis' room, apart from the lack of modern conveniences (the bathtub is an old-fashioned basin filled with hot water), also looks quite nice with its bed and old-fashioned dresser and vanity mirror, as does the dining room, with the reasonably large table, fireplace in the back, and a picture and lamp on its

mantle. In a corridor off to its right, there are busts of the past Marleys' faces and heads, along with plaques and some more portraits, and there's also a study with a large, black piano. Really, the only noteworthy rooms in the house are Percival's laboratory (which is very small and filled with the typical bubbling chemistry set, electrical equipment, shelves of books, anatomy charts, and even what appears to be a mummy in the back

wall), the space down in the cellar with the padded cell where Muldoon is kept, and, most memorably of all, the conservatory where a museum of torture devices, consisting of a guillotine, rack, and iron maiden (which itself has a trapdoor that drops down into the cellar), are kept. That's to say nothing of the small metal room with the descending ceiling Jack wanders into and is nearly crushed in, a scene that I do find tense simply because that kind of stuff gets to me anyway.

As you've seen by this point, the movie's low budget is quite apparent in its look. Granted, all of these screenshots come from a stream of a cable TV airing, so that could factor into its being blurry at some points (although, that airing was supposedly in HD), but it's still obvious that this was made on the very cheap, as the black-and-white isn't up to the standards of other monochrome movies made around this time, some of them just as low budget. It still manages to give it some atmosphere but it's

of a rather murky quality that can make it a bit hard to see sometimes, especially in the exterior nighttime shots. Also, despite the black-and-white, you can clearly tell when such scenes were actually filmed in the daytime, and it's made even more obvious by there being scenes that actually were done at night. Finally, as incredible as this may sound, there are some very cheap, crude instances of visual effects work, such as a poorly matted in bolt of lightning at the beginning and a stiffly-animated arc of electricity that Muldoon tries to shove Jack's head into up in Percival's laboratory.

Following a mundane opening credits sequence that plays out over Jack Robinson driving out of London and into the dark English countryside (the most noteworthy aspect is how the word "horror" in the title droops down in a ghoulish fashion), the movie truly starts with him stopping at a crossroads and using his flashlight to have a look at a sign. After getting back into his car and glancing at his map, he drives on through the woods for a bit,

when his car gives out on him. Unable to start it back up, he gets out and pushes it from behind. After three shoves, it rolls on ahead, only to quickly get away from him and crash down into a ravine, turning upside down as it rolls to a stop. Enraged, slamming his cap down onto the ground and yelling in frustration, he then looks and sees a large manor across the way. Walking to it, he reaches the door and finds a note above the

doorbell that reads, "No peddlers allowed! Ring bell at your own risk!!!" Deciding not to take the chance, Jack goes to use the knocker, only for it to come off in his hand. Regardless, he smacks it against the mail slot on the door, and stands there for a few seconds, but gets no answer. Knocking again and still not getting a response, he decides to heck with it and pushes the doorbell, only for a gunshot to blow out of a panel near the top of the door, startling him to where he falls to the ground.

The door then opens by itself and voice can be heard over a megaphone, saying, "Ah, an unexpected visitor. Won't you join us?" Due to this initial unwelcoming reception, Jack hesitates, but the voice says, "Oh, don't be bashful. Come in." Cautiously getting to his feet, he walks through the door, which closes behind him. Standing in the dark, he's asked by the voice who he is, and the man then recognizes him when he says his name is Robinson. The man lights up a lantern in the foyer

and introduces himself as Reginald Marley, the uncle of Cynthia Marley. Happy to know he's in the right place, Jack eagerly tries to shake hands with him, though he first holds out his hat and then the knocker before managing to put his actual hand out. Apologizing for his reception, telling him the bullet that fired at him was just a blank, he then tells him he's come at a tragic time, when Cynthia shows up and, surprised to see him, eagerly greets him. Reginald walks off to let them have some time alone.

Explaining to Cynthia that he decided not to wait a month to ask her uncle to consent to their marriage, Jack then tells her how his car, and luggage, is now at the bottom of a ravine. She leads him upstairs, and when Jack asks what Reginald meant about his coming at a bad time, she opens a door to reveal the body of her cousin, Creighton, lying in a coffin. She explains that he suddenly died the night before, and then shows him to the room he'll be

staying in. They open the door and are surprised to find Reginald in there, who says he was seeing that the room was in good condition. After telling Jack they have few modern conveniences like electric lighting, telephones, or television, Reginald leaves them alone. Cynthia tries to leave as well, but Jack has other plans, as he pulls her back into the room and starts kissing her hungrily. She then gives him her cousin's clothes to wear and talks about not

rushing into things regarding their marriage, although he thinks they know each other well enough, seeing as how they met a month before (yeah, that's more than enough time). She explains her family are sticklers for tradition and they mustn't seem too eager to jump into marriage, before leaving him, almost absentmindedly taking his washing brush with her. Some time later, Jack's in a robe and is about get into bed, but when he throws back the bedspread and sheets, he doesn't notice he has a

bedfellow in the form of a big tarantula. Taking off the robe and removing his slippers, he climbs into bed and lies down. Needless to say, he finds it hard to get comfortable and scratches at his back. Sitting up and leaning forward, he raises up his shirt and scratches at his back again. It's shown that the tarantula is gripping onto the small of his back and, when he feels and then sees it, he promptly flings it off him and jumps out of the bed with a yelp. He runs for the door, only for someone to come in at the same time and knock him to the floor. The man, apologizing for that, helps him up and says he heard him cry out. Jack shows him the tarantula and he explains that it belongs to his uncle, Percival, i.e. the guy who booby-trapped the doorbell. The man takes out a handkerchief, wraps the tarantula up in it, and picks it up, saying, "Percival wouldn't like to lose that."

He puts it in a small compartment in the dresser and then asks Jack where they were in their conversation. Jack, for the second time, asks him who he is and he says, "Oh, yes, of course, yes. I know the cue. Surely that's my line, old man, isn't it? Let's run over the script once more, shall we? Now, then, uh... night, howling storm (thunder is heard at that moment), hideous scream, interior: bedroom. The door opens, and our hero, that's me,

discovers a stranger in his room. At which point I say, 'Who are you?'" When Jack introduces himself, the man in turn does the same, tells him he's Cornwallis Marley, suggesting that he's heard of him before reciting some passages from Shakespeare and explaining that he's currently, "Between engagements." Jack notes that the tarantula could make him think someone were trying to kill him but Cornwallis says that, more than likely, he himself was the target, since it's his room

(given that tarantulas are not deadly, I highly doubt either is a likely possibility). He also adds that the perpetrator is the same person who murdered Creighton by leaving the window, knowing that his health was fragile and he was susceptible to chills, and that the Marley family, in general, are somewhat misanthropic. When Jack mentions that he hasn't yet met the whole family, Cornwallis,

taking the tarantula, says, "You haven't lived," and leaves the room. Jack, locking the door, grabs the washing brush and smacks down the bed, then looks under the sheets and pillows to make sure there aren't any other surprises waiting for him. He sits down in bed and nervously looks about the room.

The next morning, Jack and Cynthia join Reginald, Cornwallis, and Percival in the dining room for breakfast. Jack's greeting of, "Good morning," is ignored by Reginald and the others, the former being preoccupied with something else, as he glances at the door to the room and looks at his watch. Natalia then enters and sits in the chair to Jack's left, explaining to Reginald that she had a "wakeful night." Reginald formally introduces the

two of them, with Jack shaking Natalia's hand, which is apparently ice-cold, and he then introduces him to Percival, who's sitting to his right. Percival apologizes for the tarantula, then says he's hoping for great things from it, with Cornwallis explaining that he's talking about experiments he's conducting. When Jack mentions that he didn't sleep that well, Natalia adds, "Who could? There was evil about. I could feel it. I could

smell it." After declining everything except some coffee, and being rejected when he offers some to Natalia, with Cornwallis saying she doesn't drink much, "Except at night," Jack decides to go ahead and ask Reginald about his marrying Cynthia, even though she tries to talk him down. When he brings it up to him, Reginald takes it enthusiastically and says, "My dear boy, let me say right away that I like the look of you. I like the cut of your jib, as they say. I see no reason why you and Cynthia

should not get married... eventually." When asked what he means by this, Reginald says his desire to marry Cynthia as soon as possible is impulsive and rash, then reminds him of Creighton's recent death, that they're going to bury him that afternoon, and also says that the family knows nothing about him, and vice versa. Jack, in turn, quickly gives Reginald a rundown about himself: "I'm John J. Robinson, American citizen. 27 years of age. Currently an encyclopedia salesman working the

London area. I think I have about $750 in the bank. Until last night, I was the sole owner of a Rover automobile. My health is good, my prospects are better. The most important requirement is I love your niece, very, very much." (Natalia doesn't seem happy about that last bit.) Jack then asks for Reginald to tell him about the Marleys. He says he will, adding, "But first, I recommend you to make a hearty breakfast."

He shows Jack a number of busts of heads and faces of past Marleys in a nearby corridor, and introduces him to several of them by telling him of how they met their darkly humorous ends. He then says, "And that is why this house, my ancestral home, is known throughout the countryside as a house of horror... We are a blighted people, Mr. Robinson. A family accursed. When you become better acquainted with us, we may surprise you... very

much." They then return to the dining room, where Cornwallis says they're about to go ahead with the last rights for Creighton. After inviting Jack to join them in a drink, he has Natalia bring in a bottle of gin and some glasses. As he pours the in, he says he knows Natalia won't be joining them, as they don't have her usual drinks: Bloody Marys. Adding some sugar to his own glass, Cornwallis says a toast he learned in Ireland: "May you be in heaven

one full day, before the devil discovers you're dead." They down their drinks and Cornwallis goes to leave the room, only to be hit with an apparent pain in his stomach that causes him to grip onto the edges of the doorway and then collapse to the floor. Seeing this, everyone rushes to him, with Jack checking his pulse, then opening one of his eyes, and finally putting his hand over his heart. He tells them he's dead, and as they look down at his body, Natalia glances at the gin. Later, Percival tests the

drink in his laboratory. He finds there's nothing wrong with the gin itself, but when he tests the sugar Cornwallis put into his drink, he promptly spits it out and tells Jack it's been, "Enriched." The film cuts to the room with the busts, which now has one of Cornwallis.

That night, Jack prepares to go get the police, when Cynthia tells him there isn't a station for twenty miles. He also then remembers that he doesn't have his car and learns that the family has no cars, either. She mentions a bus and he decides to take that, only to learn it comes by only once a week, specifically on Thursdays at 10:15. With that, he decides to just walk, regardless of the distance, the fact that he doesn't know the countryside, and that

there's a fog outside. But when he tries to open the door, he pulls the knob out on a long cord, which recoils and slams him onto the door, a metal bar then swings over and holds him in place, and a panel up above him whacks him on the noggin. Cynthia groans, "Oh, Uncle Percival!", as Jack slumps to the floor. He regains consciousness in his bed some time later, with an ice-bag on his head and surrounded by the family. He asks what happened and Percival, again, says he's to blame, that the

device that clonked him was something he rigged to keep Muldoon from escaping. Jack initially just says, "Oh," but then realizes he hasn't heard of Muldoon before now. Reginald explains, "Another of our... surprises, Mr. Robinson," saying he'll introduce them when he's stronger, when Natalia chimes in with, "He's a creature of darkness. One who walks in the night." With that comforting tidbit, Jack leans back in his bed.

He does manage to get some sleep, but later in the night, he's awoken by the sound of animalistic snarling and growling. Getting out of bed and putting a robe on over his pajamas, he walks into the hall, only to duck back when he sees Natalia coming down, holding a candle. She walks by him (her peripheral vision must suck, as there's no way she should have missed him), saying to herself, "Hungry. So hungry," and he follows her down into

the foyer and then down a small flight of stairs leading into the cellar, as the snarling continues. Jack jumps back when he hears some maniacal laughter come from behind a door at the bottom of the stairs to his left, one which has two boards running across it. He approaches it, hearing more snarling, when he's startled by Natalia appearing in the doorway across from him, a seeming trickle of blood in the corner of her mouth. Though about to run off, he

realizes the red smear is just ketchup, as she holds up a bottle of it, along with a chunk of meat. He declines her invitation to join her in a snack, saying he has "loose gums," and then asks what's growling. She tells him it's Muldoon and, handing him the ketchup and meat, says that maybe she should introduce the two of them. Ignoring his nervously saying he probably shouldn't disturb Muldoon, she removes the top and opens that section of the door, revealing a padded cell.

Muldoon sits in the floor, laughing as a mouse crawls along his hand, when Jack says hi. Turning and seeing him, Muldoon gets to his feet and grabs him by the throat, lifting him up off the floor and laughing crazily as he chokes him. Natalia orders him to release Jack and he promptly drops him. As Jack gets to his feet, rubbing his throat, Natalia tells Muldoon he will be "severely punished" for the attack, a prospect that terrifies him, as he starts whining and shaking his head. He even gets on his

knees, begging, but she orders him up and says she'll take care of him later, closing the door and putting the bar back. She then explains to Jack how Muldoon went mad after being held captive by head-hunters and that he now sees everybody as a head-hunter, adding that only she can control him. Jack, naturally, says he needs to be put away but Natalia says he's already escaped from three asylums, one time even ripping apart a straight-jacket with his teeth. Creepily, she says she

controls Muldoon with love, adding, "I am a woman, you see," (again, keep in mind that Muldoon is her brother). She starts coming onto Jack, running her hands over his shoulders, and he promptly decides it's time for him to go back to bed, accidentally insinuating he's going to do so with her, when she asks if he wouldn't rather eat something first. That's when he checks his watch and sees it's only 8:00. Deciding it may be a good idea, he asks her if she could eat again after that "snack" and she says, "I have to keep up my strength, Mr. Robinson." She leads him back upstairs and he stops and says good night to Muldoon, only to recoil away when he snarls again.

At the table with the family again, Jack is now wearing a black suit that turns out to have been one of Cornwallis'. Jack doesn't get to eat much before Natalia's morbid interest in him and her talking about flesh rotting from bones prompts him to leave the room, saying, "I feel a little normal... uh, faint." Once he's out of the room, Natalia comments, "An eccentric young man." Later, Jack wanders into Percival's laboratory and sees him

mix up some sort of boiling and steaming concoction, which he drinks. Weirded out and a bit disgusted at this, Jack is about to duck out, when Percival spots him and invites him in, even offering him such a drink, which he quickly turns down. Percival goes on to tell Jack of his work for the betterment of humanity, such as finding an antidote for the venom of the tarantula that was in his room. He then shows him a large apparatus that he says is

the result of ten years' work and numerous failures, and pulling a cloth off one part of it, proclaims he's harnessed the primal forces of the universe. Under the cloth is a large glass bowl connected to numerous wires, and when he throws a switch, there's a series of loud sparks, followed by an electric glow within the glass, which he calls his "incandescent lamp." He goes on to say he calls the source of the illumination electricity, and though Jack tries to break the news to him that he's

severely behind the times, when he sees how enthusiastic he is, going on about a world lit up with electric light, he goes along with it. The light then blows out and Percival says he needs to find a stronger filament. Jack then tries to leave but Percival says he has much more to show him, such as "moving photographs" and a method of preserving music and the human voice, which is, obviously, a phonograph. He switches the latter on and it plays a tune that Percival says he composed

himself, leading into the sequence where Pat Boone sings the title song and Cynthia ends up joining them. At the end of the sequence, the lamp from before badly blows out, with the wires connected to it exploding and smoking. After getting that under control, Percival then switches the phonograph off, saying a little more bass might improve it. Jack and Cynthia then leave, the former commenting that he'll drop by again when he invents a "horseless carriage." Percival, at first, laughs that off as idiotic, but then, he starts to seriously consider it.

Back in Cynthia's bedroom, Jack confronts her with the fact that someone in the house is a murderer and they need to come up with a motive, which Cynthia accidentally does when she casually mentions that the family fortune consists of 300,000 pounds or almost $1 million (I have no clue how accurate that exchange rate is). Then, when Jack asks who would benefit the most from everyone else being offed, Cynthia says that Grandpa, who's

permanently bedridden, would be the one who would know that. Suddenly, there's an explosion down the hall, and when Jack opens the door, Percival walks out of a cloud of smoke, his clothes charred, and tells him, "I'm afraid it's hopeless, Mr. Robinson... Locomotion by means of an electrically ignited fuel. No, it's much too dangerous. No, you can take it from me, young fellow, we shall never replace the horse." He walks

out of the room, coughing, and both Jack and Cynthia try to stifle their laughter, with Jack commenting, "Darling, I hope I'm not around when he invents the atom bomb." They then head out of the room to go see Grandpa, who's in his bed, seemingly reading a newspaper. When Cynthia walks in, he admonishes her for not knocking, and when she says she didn't think he'd hear, he answers, "Of course not. You know I don't drink beer." She then tries to tell him she's going to

introduce him to her fiance, which he doesn't hear right at all, and when Jack walks in, Grandpa grabs his medicine and downs it from the bottle, saying he startled him. When he makes out that Cynthia loves Jack, he says she has his blessing, but he wants to know a little about him. When Jack says he's from America, Grandpa, again, grabs his medicine and drinks it. He then says, "America, eh? I was there once. Still got a scar where an arrow hit me." They try to make him understand

that Jack wants to talk to him about the money and estate, but he thinks he's saying he's in a state, prompting him to drink more medicine. When he hears the word "money," he becomes upset, thinking Jack is interested in that and nothing else, and makes him leave the room. He does, and after Cynthia tells him not to be upset and to remember his medicine, she leaves Grandpa alone and he goes back to reading his newspaper... or, rather, the issue of Playboy he was hiding in it. Jack and Cynthia go back to their rooms for the night, although Jack initially tries to follow her into her own.

When he wakes up the next morning, Jack is about to wash up, when he hears a knock at his door and sees that an envelope has been slipped under it. He walks over, takes the letter out of it, and reads, "My dear sir, accept my apologies. The information you want is hidden in Mordekay's museum, located in the conservatory just off the hall. Proceed with utmost caution. Grandfather Marley." Thinking he may find the will down there, he gets dressed and makes his way to the conservatory, which he finds

is filled with bizarre stuff like a devil mask and a stuffed bear. Unbeknownst to him, someone is watching from behind a portrait that's had the eyes cut out. He wanders about the museum, glancing at a guillotine display, a rack, numerous skeletons, both human and animal, and a chopping block with a bunch of fake heads on the floor in front of it. He also finds what appears to be a coffin standing upright against the wall, but when he opens it, he finds it's actually an iron maiden, with the dummy

of a woman inside. On her chest is a note that reads, "This wax dummy is an exact replica of Ms. Gloria Van Wicket, star of the stage production of the Mad Marquee at the Grand Guignol, Paris 1907." Jack then asks, "How long can you go?", and gets his answer when he innocently rests his arm on a lever next to the casket, opening a trapdoor below the dummy that sends it crashing down into the cellar below. Flustered, he walks on and comes upon a metal shutter on the wall, which

he opens up to find a small, metal room with a ceiling that's only a few feet above him. The person watching from behind the portrait sees him enter the room and then, the shutter quickly closes behind him. He finds he can't lift it up like before, and then sees that the ceiling is slowly coming down. He tries to force his way through the shutter, slamming against it, but it proves futile. Meanwhile, up in his laboratory, Percival finds he

needs the bizarre ingredient of some powdered tana leaf and realizes he can find it down in the conservatory. As he heads down that way, the ceiling in the room gets lower and lower, to the point where Jack has to crouch down, trying desperately to open the shutter or find another way out through the walls (he repeatedly yells for help but you can see that his mouth isn't moving). Percival enters the conservatory and searches for the tana leaves,

when he hears Jack's shouting. Finding the room, he opens it and sees that Jack is lying on his back, the ceiling about to crush him. He quickly grabs his arm and pulls him out just in time. A brief cutaway shows a hand removing a bust of Jack's face from the wall of past Marleys, while Percival asks Jack how he's feeling and he answers, "How am I feeling? How do you think I'm feeling? Like pressed duck."

Up in his bedroom, Grandpa Marley is looking at another dirty magazine, when he apparently gets too excited, as he grabs at his chest. He reaches for the medicine on his nightstand, only to find it's not there. He then looks and sees that someone moved it to a table on the other side of the room. As he struggles to get out of bed and reach it, down in the conservatory, Jack remembers the note and believes Grandpa lured him down there in order to kill him (yeah, let's just ignore the fact that he

wasn't lured into that specific room but, rather, walked in of his own accord). Now thinking that he's the murderer, Jack heads to confront him, with Percival following him. Right before they reach him, Grandpa gets out of bed and almost makes it to the medicine, but his heart gives out when he reaches for the bottle and collapses to the floor. When he and Percival walk in and see what's happened, Jack immediately realizes he was dead wrong (did he really think that frail old man would

be capable of killing people?). Cut to later on, with Reginald having the unenviable task of feeding Muldoon. Opening a hatch in the door, he hands the plate to him, only for Muldoon to grab his hand and refuse to let go. He warns him, "If you don't let me go, there'll be no dessert for you. It's your favorite: blood pudding." Hearing that, Muldoon giggles madly and does release him, allowing him to close the panel. At dinner that night, Reginald is

surprisingly skeptical of Jack's claims of what happened, and is also calm about the idea of there being a murderer in the house, which exasperates both Jack and Cynthia. And then, especially crazily, Reginald insinuates that Jack himself is the culprit when he says that a clever murderer would try to make it seem as though there were an attempt on his own life. He goes on to state the reason why Jack would be killing people, i.e. the family fortune, which Cynthia would inherit and put him in a position to gain some of it as well. Jack doesn't get a chance to defend himself before the scene cuts, with Natalia offering him some blood pudding, which he quickly turns down.

Midnight strikes on Halloween, which delights Reginald, as he wears a mask in the study, along with Percival and Natalia, the latter of whom starts playing that traditional funeral dirge on the piano. Reginald laments that Cornwallis isn't with them to enjoy the festivities and they all recite a quote he would often say. Jack, wearing a tuxedo, comes in and says it's an odd time to throw a party, but Reginald says that Halloween only comes once a year. He then asks where Cynthia is and no one

seems to know. Worried for obvious reasons, he goes looking for her, calling for her in the foyer and then heading down into the cellar. Down there, it's revealed that the boards on Muldoon's door have been ripped off and he easily opens it. Turning and seeing him, Jack is about to ask if he's seen Cynthia, when he then realizes he's talking to the raging madman, who snarls and starts chasing him upstairs. Up in the foyer, Jack puts the table near the stairs between himself and Muldoon,

trying to tell him he's not a head-hunter, only for Muldoon to chase him on up to the second floor. Jack runs blindly and ducks inside Percival's laboratory, locking the door behind him. Muldoon very easily breaks through the door but falls when he does. Jack takes the opportunity to smash a bottle over his head, but this does nothing but momentarily daze him and he then lunges at him. Jack frantically grabs bottle after bottle and throws

them at him, and when that doesn't work, he ducks behind a telescope, which Muldoon grabs and uses to fling him into a chair. Muldoon chases him out of the chair and Jack tries to fend him off with a burner, only for him to smack it away. He grabs him by the back of the neck, and when the electrical equipment on the one table activates, he tries to shove his head into the arcing electricity, laughing crazily. Jack manages to elbow him in the

side and is able to slip away from him and run out of the lab. He runs back down to the foyer and hides in a corner beside the stairs, but Muldoon easily finds him when he runs down there as well. Jack slips out between his legs and runs through the door to the conservatory, with Muldoon chasing him and then trying to rip through the door.

Hearing some mumbling in the back of the room, Jack notices the closed iron maiden is shaking. Running to it and opening it up, he finds Cynthia inside, gagged and with her hands tied behind her back. He removes the gag and unties her wrists, when Muldoon smashes his way into the conservatory. Jack swings around upon hearing this and accidentally hits the lever beside the iron maiden that opens the trapdoor, sending Cynthia plummeting into the basement. As Muldoon approaches, Jack grabs the

large axe from the chopping block display and warns him to stay back. When he still approaches, Jack comes down with the axe but misses and sticks the blade into the floor. Muldoon lunges at him and Jack throws one of the fake heads in the display, then runs through the skeletons next to it and to the stuffed bear at the entrance. He pushes the bear at Muldoon when he runs at him and Muldoon twirls around with it, as though the two of them were dancing. He pushes it aside and tries

to continue the chase, but Jack uses the iron maiden's trapdoor to escape. Finding Cynthia down there, Jack and her run back upstairs into the house, while Muldoon jumps through the trapdoor and continues chasing them. They run through the foyer and out the front door, onto the grounds, hiding behind a statue around the corner of the house. Muldoon runs out there as well and, having lost sight of them, searches about. When he walks past the spot where they're hiding, they run back to

the door and try to get in, only to find it locked. They pound on the door and yell for someone to let them in, as Muldoon snarls and starts towards them. With no other recourse, Jack pushes the doorbell, activating the gun in the door. It fires and hits Muldoon right in the forehead, which he grabs at and then collapses to the ground. Shocked at this, Jack and Cynthia approach him and, looking at the bullet-hole in his forehead, realize he's dead,

that someone replaced the blanks in the gun with real bullets. Jack is about to bring Cynthia along with him to go fetch the police, despite the impossibly long walking distance, when Percival comes outside and asks if he can speak with Jack about a new invention he's devised. At first, Jack is far too preoccupied to even think about it, but Percival, not noticing Muldoon's body at their feet, says he thought Jack would be interested. When

Jack finally gets him to look at the body, Percival's only response is, "Oh, you're busy!" and decides to leave them alone for now. But when Percival says the invention in question was Jack's own idea, he asks what he's talking about. He clarifies that he's invented the "horseless carriage" they discussed before, and after Jack learns he's not just talking about a little model, he asks Percival to show it to him.

The thing turns out to be exactly what he says it is: a carriage with no horses at all, the body of which is made from an old hearse. Regardless of its dubious appearance, Jack and Cynthia decide to try it out, with Percival filling the tank up with fuel (which is actually gin) and telling Jack how everything works. Apprehensively, Jack presses the ignition button and, despite a loud backfire, the thing does start up. Percival tells him about the "steering mechanism" and the "warning device,"

i.e. the horn, which he has Jack test (it plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). They very slowly begin driving across the grounds, when Jack asks where the brakes are; Percival says, "Brakes? Ooh, I knew there was something I'd overlooked." He then returns to the house and study, where Reginald is doing a tango-like dance to the funeral dirge Natalia is playing. He tells them that Jack and Cynthia have gone for the police, which is when they, in turn, suggest that he may be the murderer.

But, when he turns it around on them and says that either of them could very well be the murderer, too, they don't take kindly to the accusation and chase him out of the room. Meanwhile, Jack and Cynthia don't get far on the horseless carriage before it blows out. As he fiddles with it, Jack says he hopes it's not a trap, as he's not sure Percival isn't the murderer. Cynthia says, "He isn't the murderer," and pulls a gun on Jack. At first, he tries to laugh it

off as, hopefully, just an ill-timed joke, but she tells him she's serious, saying she wanted to get the money and then be with him, but he spoiled everything by showing up and investigating the killings. She confesses to everything, including the metal room in the conservatory, the tarantula in his bed, which she says was meant for Cornwallis but he moved in too quickly, Muldoon getting loose, and the real bullet that killed him. She even admits

to putting herself in the iron maiden and insists that Muldoon wouldn't have harmed her because he only saw men as head-hunters. Jack then manages to restart the carriage and drives on, despite Cynthia still holding the gun on him and ordering him to stop the car so she can kill him and then go back to the house in order to finish off the others. Jack grabs for the gun and the two of them wrestle for it, as the carriage heads for the edge of the woods, with Cynthia ultimately hitting him over the head with it.

Jack awakens in a hospital bed, as a doctor is examining him and preparing to give him an injection. He slowly regains consciousness and looks at the doctor's hand as he takes his wrist and goes for the injection, when something about the hand makes his eyes widen. Out in the hall, Cynthia talks with another doctor, asking how Jack is, when the doctor says Jack has his own doctor, which can't be the case, given that he's a recently arrived American. They then hear the sound of a

struggle in Jack's room and when they walk in, they find he's laid the doctor out on the bed. Though Cynthia says she was going to tell him who the killer really is, he says he's already found out. He proceeds to rip off the imposter's fake nose and mustache, eyebrows, and wig, revealing him to be none other than a disguised Cornwallis. While the doctor goes to get the police, Cynthia tells Jack she found out the truth when he put her in the iron maiden and that she couldn't tell him at the time

because Muldoon was chasing them. She also says she pretended to be the killer just to protect Jack and that the gun she pulled on him had only blanks. Cornwallis, in turn, after learning that his ring is what gave him away to Jack, reveals the drug he used to make it look as though he had died. The doctor returns with a bobby, who quickly arrests Cornwallis. Despite what's happened, he and Cynthia share an amicable goodbye, but when she

says she'll probably never see him again, he says, "I don't know. What are the words of that old hymn? 'The vile sinner may return.'" He's then taken away, leaving Jack and Cynthia alone in the room (she calls him her uncle here, even though he established as a cousin). After all that, she says Jack probably won't want to have anything to do with her or her family, but he tells her she's not getting rid of him that easily, saying, "We'll be man and wife before you can say 'Jack...", and in the

next cut, when he says, "Robinson," they've just gotten married and are leaving for their honeymoon. They walk to the horseless carriage, with the other Marleys and the priest following them, Percival throwing confetti at them from his hat (I know it's probably supposed to be rice, but it looks like confetti), which he then puts on, forgetting that it is full of the stuff. They climb up onto the carriage and ride off on it, but as they wave back at the onlookers, the driver turns to look at them, revealing himself to be Cornwallis, as his quote, "The vile sinner may return," is replayed.

In addition to the title song, the film has a somewhat memorable music score, composed by Douglas Gamley. The opening credits is most memorably played to a very swinging number, with loud, blasting trumpets and some constant cymbal tapping, a bit that's repeated during the ending credits as well. AS you might expect, the music has a lot of humorous flourishes to it, like how it mimics Jack's movements when he gives his car three shoves when it quits on him, plays an overly cutesy and sentimental instrumental of Rock-a-Bye Baby when Jack lies down in bed with the tarantula and a dopier-sounding version when he later smacks down his bed with his washing brush, and when Reginald tells Jack of his grandfather and how he met his end by the very horses he raised, you can hear a soft trumpet in the background of the theme that's playing. That's to say nothing of the low, silly-sounding horn bits that play whenever something bad happens to Jack, like when he gets knocked out by the booby-trap at the front door. But it's not all humor, as the scene in the room with the descending ceiling is played to a very tense and frantic piece that only increases in severity as it goes on, and the chase with Muldoon during the third act isn't scored for laughs, either, although it's not exactly intense at the same time.

While a lot of people, including Terence Fisher himself, may consider The Horror of It All to have been the worst thing he ever made, I think it's more so-so at best. There's nothing about it that's irredeemably bad, but there's nothing amazing about it either. Pat Boone makes for an okay lead, the other actors all do a good job as well, the art direction and cinematography are competent enough, if nothing special, and the music, especially the title song Boone sings, is pretty fair and even catchy at points. The biggest issue is that this is just another comedic take on The Old Dark House, and while I do think it's somewhat better than the William Castle movie, it's hardly gut-busting in its comedy, and the nighttime exterior scenes can be really hard to make out. Most of all, though, Fisher directs it in such a technically competent but by-the-numbers manner, even more so than Castle did with his movie, that it's obvious he didn't give a crap about what he was making. All in all, while I don't think it's so bad that it deserves having not been released on any home video format, I can only recommend this for Terence Fisher completionists, big fans of Pat Boone, or truly diehard aficionados of old horror flicks.