All Rise...

Judge Jim Thomas is always the first one to look in the basement.

The Charge

Evil Has a New Home.

The Case

The opportunity of a lifetime has dropped into the Rolf family's laps. For a mere $900, they can rent the slightly-run down Allardyce mansion—for the entire summer. Ben (Oliver Reed, Gladiator), 12 year-old Davey, and Ben's Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis, All About Eve) are a little apprehensive—it really does sound too good to be true, after all—but Ben's wife Marian (Karen Black, Family Plot) is enchanted with the house and the sprawling grounds, and at length she convinces her husband to take the house. The Allardyce siblings—Eileen Heckart (The Bad Seed) and Burgess Meredith (Rocky)—do have one condition: Their mother insists on staying in the house; the Rolfs will leave meals outside her room, but will not speak with her, as she is obsessed with her privacy. Initially things are fine; Mariam delights in roaming the house, even dressing in some of the Victorian garb she's found. Ben, though, is having problems. First he almost drowns Davey in the pool; then he starts having hallucinations of a spooky chauffeur (Anthony James, High Plains Drifter) that he last saw years ago at his mother's funeral. Davey almost asphyxiates in bed when a gas heater in his room turns itself on. As the weirdness continues, Marian becomes more and more distant, and the house begins to regenerate—old roofing slide off, revealing new shingles underneath, and a conservatory goes from being full of dead vines to being a thriving garden. Why, it's enough to make one think that there's something supernatural afoot!

Burnt Offerings has a fairly loyal following, and in some respects it's easy to understand why. Co-written and directed by Dan Curtis, the man behind Dark Shadows and the classic made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror, Burnt Offerings has several effective scenes, Anthony James is particularly creepy as the chauffeur who haunts Ben's memories. But while several of these scenes are effective in isolation, other scenes plod along, preventing the movie from developing any narrative momentum. Moreover, as there really isn't anything original, you quickly discern how everything is going to play out. It's enjoyable for fans of the haunted house genre, but aside from the well-crafted ending and ridiculously talented cast (One Academy award winner (Davis), and four nominees (Black, Reed, Heckart, and Meredith)), there's nothing that elevates the movie from the pack.

The video is…well, let's just go with problematic. The 1.85:1 negative was remastered—there's not a lot of film damage and there's a nice patina of film grain, colors are inconsistent—muted in some scenes and vivid in others. Similarly, the 1080p HD image is clear in some scenes, deliberately hazy in others. There's no real pattern to the variation, so it's hard to determine what Curtis was trying to accomplish; my best guess is that the muted colors highlight the way that the house is almost literally sucking the life out of the family, but that may be a reach. The DTS-HD2.0 Master Audio is pretty respectable, though, with good presence in the lower registers—surprising for a movie this old, actually. The disc sports a good set of extras. You get interviews with writer William F. Nolan and actors Lee Montgomery (Davey) and Anthony James (the chauffeur from hell), plus two commentary tracks—one brought over from the 2003 DVD release, with Curtis, Black, and Nolan, and a new track with film historian Richard Harland Smith. You get a lot of good information about the production—and yes, there are more than a few stories about Reed's off-screen carousing. The original trailer, including an episode of Trailers from Hell, round things off.

Richard Pryor had a riff on The Amityville Horror that played off a simple question: Why do you stupid people stay in this house when shit gets crazy? It's a fair question, and you can't watch Burnt Offerings without it popping into your head—particularly since there's no gradual progression—we go from zero to batcrap crazy faster than a cheetah on crack. There could certainly be legitimate reasons for them to stay—there could be weather issues, for instance, such as in The Shining, or perhaps the Rolf's marriage is in trouble and they're desperate to make the summer retreat work, or any number of things. But any of those options would have required characterization, and that is one thing that is in extremely short supply, leaving Black, Reed, and Davis few options beyond chewing up as much scenery as possible.

The Verdict

The cast's best efforts can't elevate this material above the ordinary. Guilty.

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