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Review (Contains Spoilers)

Although it hardly stands out as one of the best known of the myriad “maniac on the loose” exploitation opuses spawned by the success of Tobe Hooper’s seminal classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Joseph Ellison’s tawdry and uncompromising Don’t Go In The House justly enjoys a modest reputation as one of the most twisted and pernicious. Assaulting jaded exploitation and horror mavens with the sort of contentious imagery and nihilistic tone that, retrospectively speaking, it is impossible to believe was ever permissible in any era, Don’t Go In The House not surprisingly happened to be one of a number of violent cheapjack horror pictures to run afoul of our beloved moral guardians here in Britain during the early eighties. During a time where the United Kingdom was in the midst of a tabloid press instigated panic over so-called “Video Nasties” Don’t Go In The House was released fully uncut on UK video with the unforgettably lurid tagline “In a steel room built for revenge they die… burning in chains” only to swiftly and predictably find its way onto the list of banned video titles. Although it would be re-issued towards the end of the eighties following heavy cuts, Ellison’s film still remains one of the select few Video Nasties yet to see an uncut re-release in Britain.

Don’t Go In The House stars Dan Grimaldi as warped. Mother dominated weirdo Donny Kohler. Having been cruelly and systematically belittled and abused by his mother throughout his childhood Donny has grown up into a dangerously disturbed sociopath whilst holding down a job at a waste incineration plant which fuels his dangerous obsession with pyromania.

One evening after work Donny arrives back home to the vast, semi-dilapidated old mansion where he and his mother reside only to discover that having been ill for several days his mother has died during his absence. His mothers death finally provides the catalyst for Donny’s descent into complete and total psychosis. After absconding from work Donny lures an attractive and unwitting female florist back to his house only to attack her then burn her to death. Donny subsequently sets about attempting to ensnare further female victims only to be halted in his crazed misogynist crusade when he is engulfed (quite literally) by his own rampant inner demons.

It would not be at all unfair to roughly summarise Don’t Go In The House as the kind of disreputable little shocker that self appointed moral watchdogs and outraged feminists had at the forefront of their imagination when pelting their local MP’s with letters concerning the corruptive, evil influence of horror films. In actuality despite its semi-notoriety Don’t Go In The House happens to be a rather generic and heavily derivative affair that bases its familiar narrative and structure around a series of predictable motifs that had already been regurgitated many times before. More of a psychotic character study than a conventional horror film, Don’t Go In The House is essentially little more than a mild riff on the mother-obsessed loony theme of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho which in itself was heavily indebted to the ghoulish factual accounts of sociopath Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein and his ghoulish activities. Additionally Don’t Go In The House offers shades of isolated, nightmarish mental collapse doubtlessly influenced by Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) not to mention a generous dollop of exploitative sadism. Rather predictably given its plot, Don’t Go In The House also draws heavily upon the familiar clichés of the abused themselves becoming abusers in adulthood and of course female promiscuity resulting in a swift and brutally horrific death.

With its unashamed guttersnipe nastiness Don’t Go In The House was not by any means alone, with similarly grubby shockers such as William Lustig’s gory exploitation classic Maniac (1980), Robert Hammer’s seedy Don’t Answer The Phone! and Romano Scavolini’s nihilistically grisly Nightmares In A Damaged Brain (1981) all sitting alongside it to represent a markedly nastier strain of the slasher/crazed maniac formula which was at its peak during this period. Although it never reaches the same outrageous heights of the two aforementioned efforts Don’t Go In The House certainly succeeds in achieving its own uniquely sleazy sense of grim verisimilitude. Although Joseph Ellison’s direction is rather bland and colourless this oddly works in the films favour in that the lack of any real style or tone leaves Don’t Go In The House more or less a blank easel to be filled in by its contentious content.

Of course no detailed analysis of Don’t Go In The House would be complete without detailed discussion of one particular scene which stands out as not only the films most memorable but also in my mind as one of the most uncomfortable and alarming this reviewer can ever recall having seen in any exploitation film (which really is saying something). The scene in question occurs when Donny has succeeded in luring pretty young florist Kathy back to his home only to then attack and knock her unconscious. When Kathy comes around she finds herself standing upright and stark naked in a steel lined room where she is bound fast by heavy chains. Donny then enters the room clad in a fireproof suit ominously wielding a flamethrower. Without the slightest hint of hesitation or mercy Donny then proceeds to douse Kathy’s nude form in petrol then uses his flamethrower to burn the poor girl to a crisp.

Shot unflinchingly with a lingering emphasis on full frontal nudity this unapologetically sadistic sequence has led many to level at Don’t Go In The House the predictable charge of misogyny. While this reviewer attaches little credence to such accusations (the sign on the marquee does say exploitation after all folks!) its still not hard to watch this scene and see where its detractors might be coming from. Given the characterisation of Donny as an abused, terminally withdrawn woman hater the gloating spectacle of him burning a nude and helpless young girl into a pillar of charcoal comes across almost like some sort of twisted symbolic extermination of womanhood. As such it would be interesting to see how Don’t Go In The House and the aforementioned scene in particular would fare if the film was to be finally resubmitted to the BBFC for classification. It should however be noted that Don’t Go In The House otherwise contains little graphic violence instead restraining itself to the odd slightly more discreet burning here or there and some brief child abuse flashbacks that make rather nasty use of a gas stove as an instrument of torture.

Predictably Ellison and company pay little more than lip service to characterisation with Donny being the only character they care to colour in with any real detail. To be fair Donny does at least make for a reasonably absorbing central character who exhibits a markedly more withdrawn and morose personality than your usual cinematic maniac. The device of having Donny speaking aloud in reply to the voices in his head and hallucinating that the charred, blackened remains of his victims are pursuing him whilst far from subtle and more than a little heavy handed in their execution nonetheless make for an effective means of conveying his burgeoning psychosis. Donny’s shining moment of insanity however comes with his learning that his mother is dead. When the realisation that he is now free to do as he likes sinks in Donny explodes into a childish display of rebellion, blasting his music up to the highest volume and bouncing up ands down on the furniture as if he were a pettily rebellious eleven year old trapped within the body and mind of an utterly demented adult. This infantile display culminates in predictably grim and nasty fashion as Donny sets about scorching the flesh of his mother’s corpse using a handy box of matches. It obviously helps matters too that Dan Grimaldi acquits himself well in his debut role. Following Don’t Go In The House Grimaldi would go on to a fairly undistinguished career of intermittent bit parts until eventually bagging himself an ongoing supporting role as Pasquale “Patsy” Parisi in the smash US TV mob drama The Sopranos.

Moving away from Donny the characterisation elsewhere leaves much to be desired with the characterisation of the female protagonists coming across as particularly lazy and cynical. Whether by accident or by design the films women receive few favours and are all sketchily characterised as either promiscuous bimbo stereotypes, snooty uptight bitches or sadistic child abusers. If one was so inclined it would be easy to interpret this as quantification of the films perceived misogynistic stance but in all honesty it feels that this is more due to the pure laziness evident in much of the films writing. At any rate those looking to tar Don’t Go In The House by accusing its makers of a female hating agenda would do well to bear in mind that ironically enough both the films producer and co-writer are women.

Although fairly derivative in terms of its narrative and rather bland in its actual execution Don’t Go In The House succeeds on a purely visceral sucker punch level. It goes without saying that any film prepared to portray the gloating, almost fetishistic incineration of an attractive, naked young woman seemingly for titillation is bound to be pretty unrelenting stuff, but even by exploitation standards Don’t Go In The House is a grim shocker to say the least, its effect only accentuated by the (sensible) absence of any leavening humour. Only a hideously behind the times disco sequence offers anything even resembling a laugh and even then it’s an unintentional one. In fact with its unerringly fatalistic and downbeat tone Don’t Go In The House comes across almost like the American equivalent of a Pete Walker movie only without the pitch black irony or acerbic social subtexts synonymous with that particular filmmaker. Inevitably the workmanlike direction and formidably harsh content are bound to repel the average viewer but on the other hand those very same traits render Don’t Go In The House a delectably lurid slice of low budget nastiness for jaded exploitation mavens who think they’ve seen it all.

Also Try… Maniac (1980, William Lustig) / Nightmares In A Damaged Brain / Don’t Answer The Phone! / The Driller Killer / Frightmare (1974, Pete Walker / Schizo (1976, Pete Walker) / Visiting Hours.

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Piczo