HOUSE OF MYSTERY

US, 1934, 69 minutes, Black and white.
Ed Lowry, Verna Hillie, John Sheehan, Joyzelle Joyner, George 'Gabby Hayes'.
Directed by William Nigh.

This is another of those early 1930s brief supporting features with touches of comedy and touches of horror and scare. Old dark houses were very popular at this stage and, ultimately, this is a variation.

It opens in Asia, rather generically, where an American adventurer, with very racist and superior attitudes, is in love with a dancer at ritual ceremonies, is searching for prized statues, is confronted by a Hindu priest and violently responds, escaping with the help of the woman.

After 20 years, some people who financed the original expedition, especially a very, very absent-minded professor and his rather humorously dominant wife, go to an agent who calls the American investors together – at 8.30 p.m. at the home of the adventurer who has been discovered and is now in a wheelchair, still with his assistant Hindu woman and a gorilla, (as well as a stuffed gorilla who are interchanged throughout the film for some of the killings).

Some of the investors are in need of money, pressured by bookmakers, and one of them disguises himself as a gorilla and chokes a hypochondriac woman whose companion is a medium who relies on Pocahontas! There is also an intrusive young man who is an insurance salesman and takes every opportunity to promote his case.

There are various horror shenanigans, mysterious deaths, revelation that the adventurer had organised everything, murdering investors in England, and planning to kill those in the US. There are complications with the insurance man being attracted to the adventurer’s full-time nurse, the Hindu woman waiting decades to get her revenge (which she does, the adventurer revealing that he is not crippled, and her locking the door, incense pervading the room and tom-toms which of the queue for the real gorilla to attack), moving the real gorilla into a room and bringing out the fake one when it suits her. There are also police, not always as competent as they might be – and a strange electrician who, it is revealed, is really a Scotland Yard inspector!

The opening of the film was a reminder of brash and brutal colonial superiority. The rest of the film is very American, mysterious killer, disappearing victims…