The House That Vanished (1973)

So much average

Absolutely the worst movie.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

For the want of a better plot, this slow-paced vintage horror flick has lovely Airhead Playmate Andrea Allan as its main attraction, and she's convincing enough as a pretty face to rest your eyes on.There's a lot of eerie 70s atmosphere, but that's just about it.A summary: Airhead follows her sordid boyfriend to a deserted house in order for him to break an entry. No reason is given for his choice of burglary object. In fact, he has a hard time finding the location. He even resorts to using a map! Well, they get there by nightfall, and while he's searching the premises, a couple enters of which the male party gets down to killing the female, not knowing that Airhead and Burglar are hiding out watching them. Airhead runs for the car but has lost the ignition key so she flees through the woods to a car junkyard, with the murderer in her tracks.She escapes, and then basically nothing happens for a good hour.The viewer would perhaps be expecting the deserted house to mysteriously disappear as the title does indicate a story of a vanished house. However, no quest of the house ever takes place, so the movie isn't really about a vanished house but something else (that unravels in the very last five minutes).Airhead is totally unmoved by watching murders and corpses; rather a far cry from the American Scream Queens.Lots of nudity and sex, with compliments to the director: he's from Barcelona!

'Scream and Die!' is another woefully obscure Jose Ramon Larraz horror excursion from the early 70's that is entirely undeserving of its current position of lost title. All the requisite Larraz traits are in abundance here; libidinous, scantily clad buxom women, creaky, dimly lit houses and some elusive sexually 'unusual' maniac knocking off a series of shrieking, top-heavy females. The basic giallo-esque plot of some black-gloved killer doesn't stray from convention, but where Larraz succeeds and many other similar filmmakers fail is that he always manages to generate a palpably erotic and decadent tone among all the familiar heavy breathing stalk and slash; besides the abundance of candle-lit cleavage he also infuses the admittedly generic premise with oodles of genuinely unsettling Gothic motifs. After reading a few glib, dismissive reviews of 'Scream...and Die' I really wasn't expecting much, but contrary to low expectations the film proved to be entirely entertaining with a series of demonstratively eerie set pieces that managed to evoke a sweaty-palmed Poe-like, sepulchral chill.

Despite all the bad things I'd heard about this film, I decided to go right ahead and watch it anyway as both the titles (Scream and Die, and even better, The House That Vanished) sounded interesting and director José Ramón Larraz did make one of the best lesbian vampire movies of all time with the excellent Vampyres. I have to admit that the film isn't quite as bad as I was expecting; there's a good atmosphere and a few decent moments of tension; but overall I have to go with the majority opinion here and say that the film is very dull on the whole and is mostly riddled with genre clichés. The film gets off to a promising start as a young couple stumble upon an old house in the woods. Being a thief, the boyfriend decides that they should loot it. However, instead of valuable items; the couple find a murder. The girl flees the house and the boyfriend vanishes. Naturally she tells people what she's seen upon returning to society, but her attempts to find the house again fail - the house has...errr...vanished. Anyway, she finds another bloke but the murderer is still out there...The film features the cheap looking and very cheap sounding British style that many seventies British horror films feature. José Ramón Larraz photographs the film well and gives it a thick and foreboding atmosphere that does benefit it; although it must be quite difficult to make a film about an old house and not have some sort of atmosphere. The plot is the biggest problem with this film as it is really boring and not much of interest happens. There's a murder sequence that sees a naked woman get sliced that's well done and it's one of the few highlights. José Ramón Larraz does make an attempt to make up for the lack of plot with plenty of naked women, most of which are quite beautiful so that was nice of him. There's not a great deal of gore in the film, though it does seem to want to incorporate as much of the Giallo style into the film as possible. The characters in this film are pretty stupid and make daft decisions, and this stretches all the way to the ending which is completely obvious and can be seen coming a mile off. Overall, I can't say that I enjoyed this film much and I can't recommend it either.

THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED (a stupid title!) is pretty good atmospheric psychological thriller. I had very little hope for it when I started watching this Larraz film. To make matters worse, the video transfer is very dark, grainy and the sound had some weird looping technical glitch. I quickly thought then that the movie flatlined from the get go, certainly during the scene with the woman undressing in front of the killer, which was a tad ridiculous. But when the movie ended, to my surprise, I actually enjoyed it. The film is not the greatest ever made and there are a lot of faults to it (pacing is one of them) but the atmosphere is very good and the story is more about the intertwining aspects of location and identity than horror or violence. THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED reminded me a lot of Mario Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON. It's like a twisted soap opera. This film deserves a better title. And a better transfer as well, on video or DVD, than the one that's for sale on eBay (from Media), which I bought for 50 cents!!!