Let us now delve into a classic film depicting the descent into madness of an aging movie star from the golden age of cinema trapped in her decaying mansion. Of course, I'm referring to Donald Wolfe's Hollywood Horror House (1970), Miriam Hopkins's entry into the film cycle that is now called "Grand Dame Guignol" or, less charitably, "Hagsploitation." In fact, Hollywood Horror House does not skimp on the Grand Guignol or the "sploitation," making it an unusual, though underseen, entry into the subgenre.
Of course, some of your universe's critics undervalue this film. For example, reviewer mark.waltz writes, "this ranks as an embarrassing Z grade mix of grindhouse slasher horror and the desperation of a delusional diva to keep her name alive, no matter how repulsive the film she's in is." Reviewer kira02bit writes, "Watch if you must, but there are much better options, even within this genre." And reviewer poolandrews, with some unexpected charity, writes, "It's a mildly entertaining one-time-watch at best & a complete mess of a film at worse, you decide which!"
Read on for a full appreciation of Hollywood Horror House...
After a flamboyant title sequence full of fanfare depicting the life of glamorous movie star Katharine Packard (played by Miriam Hopkins), the filmmakers wittily zoom in on the Hollywood sign as it lies decaying in the hills. Then the filmmakers even more wittily pan down to show severed body parts lying in the dirt below the sign.
A TV news announcer announces, “Another dismembered body of a Hollywood woman was discovered in the Hollywood Hills late yesterday. Homocide investigators believe she was the victim of the same psychopathic killer who has murdered and dismembered a number of middle-aged women in the Hollywood area.” (Fortunately, the newscaster mentions the word “Hollywood” three times, helping the audience identify where the film is set, in case the opening shots of the Hollywood sign were insufficient.)
At night, a Hollywood woman walks from a bar to her home, unaware she is being followed by someone wearing some nice linen pants and a long coat. The well dressed person enters the house, knocks the Hollywood woman unconscious with a pipe, then proceeds to cut off her hand with an electric knife.
Later, a young man with blood on his shoes (and wearing linen pants), gets off a Hollywood sightseeing bus (driven by tour guide Joe Besser) in front of Katharine Packard’s lavish home.
Inside the mansion, Katharine herself, wearing a Baby Jane-like white dress, wanders down her staircase, fantasizing that she is throwing a lavish party even though the mansion is empty. Oddly, Ms. Packard trips down the stairs, breaking her leg, prompting her relatives and caregivers to isolate her in her bedroom for her own safety.
The drifter who arrived on the sightseeing bus wanders around Katharine Packard’s mansion, then knocks on the door and introduces himself to the actress’s elderly maid. “My name’s Hardy,” he says. “Laurel N. Hardy.”
The maid (who looks exactly like Aunt May Parker in Steve Ditko’s original comics), thinking nothing of the unusual name, allows the drifter into the house, thinking he is applying for a caregiver position. She leads him to Miss Packard’s even more elderly assistant, Miss Blair (played by Gale Sondergaard). He introduces himself to her as Mr. Valance. Miss Blair hires him on the spot, telling him Miss Packard is an alcoholic so no alcohol is allowed.
The drifter introduces himself to Miss Packard by taking a lunch tray to her opulent room, after taking the tray from another maid (this one young) named Greta. The actress, upon seeing the drifter’s white clothes, quips, “You must be the ice cream man.”
He replies, “That’s right. What flavor would you like?”
“Vodka,” she replies.
Later, the drifter wheels Miss Packard through the house in her wheelchair. He asks about a gate inside the house that separates a dark part of the mansion. When he asks where the gate leads, Miss Packard says, “To the heart of this house, the very heart. After my husband died and I came back from Europe, I closed those rooms and I stopped entertaining.”
There follows a montage in which the drifter wheels the actress around the grounds, and then he begins tending to the overgrown gardens (“I’m pretty good at grass”), ingratiating himself into her life. When he is alone in his room in the mansion, however, things are less joyful. Amid what appears to be Satanic paraphernalia, not to mention a case filled with murder instruments like a cleaver and a bone saw, he injects drugs into his veins.
This leads to a psychedelic trip/flashback in which the drifter as a young boy runs to a door and sees his mother involved in an orgy. Of course, as young boys often do in this situation, he takes an axe and cuts off her hand.
Later, after his drug trip has ended, the drifter breaks into the closed-off portion of the house with Greta. They find a dark old room in which to make out. (As they explore the room, he calls the Asian Greta a “fortune cookie” for some reason.) As he kisses her, they are unaware they are being observed by the secretary, Miss Blair.
There follows another montage, and in this one the drifter begins an affair with Katharine Packard. She says to Miss Blair as they observe him swimming in the pool, “He does bring some life into our dreary domestic scene, doesn’t he?”
Miss Blair replies drolly, “Perhaps noise would be the better word.”
After perhaps one of the shortest musical montages in cinema history, in which Miriam Hopkins as Katharine Packard sings a few lines of a song called “Taking a Chance on Love,” the drifter (now calling himself Vic) takes Greta to a bar, makes another racist quip about her Asian heritage (“no ticky, no washy, huh?”), and drugs her. They have sex in another psychedelic montage.
Eventually, Katharine Packard, feeling rejuvenated due to the drifter’s integration in her life, throws a dinner party for her old Hollywood friends. As they finish dinner, Miss Packard mentions that the drifter wants to get into acting. To another guest, he says, “I was in an Andy Warhol movie the other week.”
The elderly woman asks, “War who?”
“Hole,” the drifter replies, “Warhol.”
“Oh, interesting,” the woman says. “What part did you play?”
“Oh, I just sat there in the movie,” he deadpans hilariously.
Oddly, the grand dinner party ends after one scene with no climax or resolution. At night after the party is over, Greta reveals to the drifter that she is pregnant. She runs away from him but he grabs her on one of the mansion’s many patios and suggests there are ways to fix situations like this. She runs away again, unaware everything is being observed by Miss Packard and Miss Blair.
In an unfortunate circumstance common in movies, Greta decides to spend one last night in the mansion before leaving the next day, and she agrees with Miss Blair that she will tell Miss Packard’s that the drifter is the cause of her decision — an agreement that is overheard by the drifter himself. With the inevitability of a wound alarm clock, we watch as Greta walks through the mansion with a flashlight looking for Vic, only to be suddenly murdered by a meat cleaver.
The next night, the drifter drives Miss Packard down the Sunset Strip, then takes her to a swinging hippie party. The partygoers (some are young and hip, but many appear to be in their fifties) recognize Miss Packard and make a big fuss about her. An elderly little person asks her if she wants coke. “I got coke, speed, smack, grass, and acid,” he says.
“No, thank you,” Miss Packard quips. “The only trips I take are to Europe.” When the little person pushes her wheelchair through the partygoers, he jokes, “Wow, I’m Katharine Packard’s pusher.”
In a clever inversion of the earlier scene in which Miss Packard imagined a glamorous Hollywood party in her mansion that didn’t exist, Katharine brings the hipster party to her house, disturbing Miss Blair to the point where she goes to the drifter’s room to investigate while he is partying. She finds the carpet bag he carries around and the case inside, but he interrupts her sneaking around. Instead of killing her, however, he simply tells her he believes she is jealous of him and she storms out of his room.
Perhaps predictably, this leads to Miss Packard passing out during the party, then appearing with Santa Claus in the Hollywood Christmas Parade that night (not a dream or a fantasy) and making a homophobic remark on live television. The next morning, Miss Blair mentions she saw Miss Packard’s on TV, but the unusual incident is never mentioned again.
After speaking with Miss Blair, Miss Packard confronts the drifter and tells him to get out of her house. He leaves her bedroom, but he locks her in the room. When she discovers she is locked into the massive bedroom, her performance becomes what can only be described as histrionic until the drifter sneaks into the room and punches her, then injects her with a drug. When she wakes up, he forces her to drink from a bottle of vodka. (Although she is an alcoholic, this kind of torture might have been more meaningful had she not gotten drunk at the hippie party and given embarrassing remarks on TV at the Christmas parade.) Shockingly, after Miss Packard is asleep, the driver injects vodka directly into her vein.
In an effectively grotesque scene, the drifter forces Miss Packard to sing a song from her movie star days. She complies but has difficulty remembering the words.
After Miss Packard tries to escape, the drifter confronts her. She cowers before him, saying “I don’t want to die!” He advances on her and the filmmakers cleverly show a closeup of his eyeball, implying he is remembering the hatchet murder of his mother. The filmmakers then cut to a shot of the hallway later as the drifter wheels a heavy trunk out of her bedroom on a dolly (cleverly mirroring the wheelchair with which he used to wheel Miss Packard through the halls).
Although Miss Blair and the maid are suspicious that the drifter might have done away with their employer, they occasionally see her sitting on her balcony across the mansion’s courtyard. However, this relief is soon eliminated when Miss Blair finds that one of Miss Packard’s costume dummies is missing from its display case — she suspects the drifter of propping up the dummy to look like Miss Packard! Miss Blair goes to the basement where the drifter stored the trunk. She opens it to find only a pile of clothes. Then she climbs the stairs to Miss Packard’s bedroom.
In the dark bedroom, she finds the drifter sleeping with the nude costume dummy. Ready for her, he attacks her with a scalpel.
He slashes Miss Blair to death, then the filmmakers cut cleverly to a screaming teapot.
In one of the film’s most effective scenes, the drifter wheels the costume mannequin around the mansion, talking to it and finally depositing it on the balcony.
In the finale, the Aunt May-like maid (the film’s final girl) carries a dinner tray to Miss Packard’s bedroom on a stormy night. Shockingly, she is attacked by the drifter as he has flashbacks to people laughing in his face. He also has a vision of the mannequin laughing; clearly, he sees the mannequin as his mother laughing at him.
In the film’s coda, we watch the sightseeing bus pull to a stop in front of the mansion again. Tour guide Joe Besser describes the mansion and the glamorous movie star Katharine Packard, unaware of the shady goings-on in the old house.
The End
If Sunset Boulevard (1950) had been made by Herschell Gordon Lewis (with access to silent film star Norma Talmadge's mansion), it would likely bear some resemblance to Hollywood Horror House. The filmmakers take advantage of the popularity of two normally unrelated genres prevalent in the 1960s: the gore movie and the film bringing back aging movie stars from Hollywood's past. Then writer/director Donald Wolfe superimposes the "seductive stranger invades a mansion" plot that would become popular in future European horror films like Blood for Dracula (1974) and The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973). All these elements lead to a disturbing but entertaining cinema experience that defies expectations. For example, one might assume a film like this would become a murder mystery with a twist at the end (perhaps Miss Blair, in love with Miss Packard all along, or even Miss Packard herself, would be revealed to be the killer). But the filmmakers are too clever to present a mystery, even though the true killer is dressed as a woman in the opening murder. They show the drifter killing women throughout the film, motivated by his stumbling upon his mother participating in an orgy, so the identity of the murderer is never in question. Despite his small filmography (directing only this classic and an obscure short film in 1961), Donald Wolfe created one of the cleverest and most satisfying of all the grand dame guignol films.