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CAPSULE: HOUSE OF DREAMS (1963)

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“The house stood alone,
a mere ghost in the midst of the modern, uncaring world.
Within her skeletal fibers secrets remained secluded forever.
The only one who might have revealed them
was now lying in a world where neither time nor flesh existed.”

– quote from Lee Hansen’s novel in House of Dreams

DIRECTED BY: Robert Berry

FEATURING: Pauline Elliott, Robert Berry, Charlene Bradley, Lance Bird

PLOT: An author writing about a haunted house begins having eerily prophetic nightmares.

COMMENTS: A low-budget horror film made by college students, House of Dreams is, understandably, an amateur effort. It’s also rather impressive for what it manages to accomplish with limited resources and a novice crew. It contains way too many uninteresting scenes of marital bickering, broken up by far too few dream sequences. Reverse the proportion of dream to reality and it would be a satisfyingly weird little chiller along the lines of Carnival of Souls (to which it’s often compared). House of Dreams doesn’t quite succeed in sustaining a spooky atmosphere but, in its best moments, it conjures surreal dreamscapes worthy of ‘s Blood of a Poet.

Lee Hansen (Berry) suffers from writer’s block. As he struggles to complete his latest novel, he begins experiencing disturbing dreams. If that wasn’t bad enough, his wife Elaine, a recovering alcoholic wrestling with her own demons, accuses him of neglecting her. She wants to take a vacation to rekindle their romance but he insists on finishing his book first. What seems like a responsible adult decision backfires on him as the subject of Lee’s book, the “old Winninger place,” takes over his unconscious mind.

Filmed on location in an actual rural Indiana “haunted” house owned by the director’s mother, House of Dreams makes good use of a genuinely creepy setting. Each of Lee’s nightmares begins with him driving to the dilapidated house and slowly approaching it from the front walkway. He reluctantly enters the front door which, of course, opens on its own to welcome him. What happens next varies from dream to dream but, amid the usual ghostly tropes, some startlingly original images appear, each nightmare concluding with a frightening final scene.

Creative use of interior architecture and unusual camera angles add to the mood of unease. With a few simple props and generous use of chiaroscuro lighting, Berry and his cinematographer show how less can be more when it comes to crafting suspenseful horror. The minimalist soundtrack, an original score, also takes a less-is-more approach.1 Occasional metronomic tappings add tension to the scenes of everyday life, and menacing electronic organ strains accompany the dream sequences. A scene in which Elaine suddenly appears in Lee’s study, wearing a ghostly white dress, feels all the more unsettling for taking place in complete silence.

As tragedies begin to befall Lee’s family members, he realizes his dreams foreshadow things to come. Unfortunately, the family drama element of the plot isn’t very compelling. The student actors aren’t quite up to the task, and unnecessarily long conversations are a major weakness in the script. Pauline Elliot isn’t bad as Lee’s wife,  and Berry does his best in the lead (a role intended for a professional actor who ended up declining the part). As director, actor, writer, and editor, Berry demonstrates a solid grounding in the fundamentals of storytelling. Footage of the Winninger place, including shots of the dramatic staircase and the overgrown well, periodically intercuts the domestic moments, illustrating the house’s growing hold over Lee and his relatives. White roses, briefly glimpsed in the opening act, recur throughout, a symbol whose full significance isn’t revealed until the very end.

Eventually, Lee decides to investigate the Winninger house in real life—or is he already trapped inside the nightmare? His penultimate foray plays out like all the other dream sequences. Lee drives to the house, he hesitates on the walkway, and the front door hangs open, taunting him to enter. Will Lee escape the house’s strange power or has he already become its final victim? Fans of low-budget ’60s horror will find House of Dreams worth a visit.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an arduous regional horror, shot for peanuts in Decker, Indiana by a group of film students in 1963. Like the long-lost sibling of Herk Harvey’s altogether more interesting Carnival of Souls (1962) this throws any established notions of narrative and logic to the wind but, unlike Harvey’s enduring diamond in the rough, fails to engage the hapless audience.”–Kevin Lyons, The EOFFTV Review 

1An alternate score written in 2019 received Berry’s approval, and the latest Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome/Bleeding Skull includes both.

House of Dreams [Blu-ray]

House of Dreams [Blu-ray]

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Capsules

CAPSULE: PINK LADY’S MOTION PICTURE (1978)

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Pinku redi no katsudo dai shashin

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DIRECTED BY: Tsugunobu Kotani

FEATURING: Keiko Masuda, Mie, Isamu Ago

PLOT: A director, a producer, and a folklorist seek the perfect idea for a movie to promote the pop band “The Pink Lady.”

Still from Pink Lady's Motion Picture (1978)

COMMENTS: How to promote a pop band cinematically? Through a musical, of course, but what kind? This movie takes this question as its starting point, exploring it through three distinct tales that traverse genres and styles.

The subject here is the iconic, albeit obscure, pop musical duo “The Pink Lady,” mad up of two girls singing as one. According to Wikipedia, they were a short-lived, briefly popular act from the late-70s and early-80s, featuring Mie and Keiko Masuda (formerly known as Kei). The movie makes clear from early on—especially through its exaggerated acting—that it will retain a lighthearted comic tone, while at the same time being self-conscious and self-referential.

This aspect of self-parody becomes apparent as we watch a film director, a folklorist, and a producer come together to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming movie about the duo. Each one of them has his own idea of what this movie should be, and chaos ensues. For viewers, this results in a fun romp, a mix of genres, each depicting a different take on the musical they want to create. We have an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, a cheesy sci-fi monster movie, and a western. Mie and Kei are always the protagonists, with playful musical numbers accompanying the story beats.

Pink Lady’s Motion Picture isn’t afraid to embrace absurdism. It doesn’t always makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to. But it’s not subversive or transgressive in any serious way; it’s harmless, mindless entertainment for mass consumption by a local, albeit westernized, Japanese audience. The flick is also of sociological interest, depicting, through the juxtaposition of disparate cinematic genres, a society divided between tradition and foreign influence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the production] consciously emulated the breezy stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of A HARD DAYS’ NIGHT (1964), and can also be viewed as a forerunner to SPICE WORLD… The film overall is colorful and energetic, but bears the marks of a hasty and ill thought-out production… fans of Mei and Kei will likely be satisfied.  Everyone else, however, is advised to turn their attention elsewhere.”–Adam Groves, The Bedlam Files

Capsules

CAPSULE: PHANTASMATAPES (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Annie Choi, Joseph A. Ziemba, Norman Earl Thompson (The Revenge of Dr. X), (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)

FEATURING: James Craig, Tota Kondo (Revenge of Dr. X); , (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)

PLOT: A double-feature of The Revenge of Dr. X and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, presented as if it was taped off of a local TV broadcast complete with VHS tracking errors, amateur commercials, and more surprises.

Still from Phantasmatapes (2025)

COMMENTS: OK, so TV stations used to broadcast cheapo horror films late at night (especially weekend nights), interrupted by badly acted commercials for local pizza parlors, shoe stores, and video rental joints. If you never experienced this phenomenon—or if, for some sick reason, you want to relive this insomniac entertainment—the retro-weirdos at Bleeding Skull have come to your rescue.

Thankfully, they don’t recreate the experience faithfully, but instead imagine the broadcast as it might have appeared if you were dead tired and fading in and out of consciousness, or if you had the flu and had taken a greater than recommended dose of Nyquil before tuning in. First off, the movies are heavily edited, to fit into a brisk 72 minute total runtime, including commercials, station IDs, and a few other intrusive surprises I won’t spoil. The ruthless edits are not a problem with the -scripted Dr. X, an extremely dull and padded Frankenstein variation about a NASA scientist who decides to spend his vacation in Japan engineering a giant, mobile Venus flytrap. In fact, this crap still drags a little when cut down to about 30 minutes. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die moves much faster, and is still relatively coherent in the edited form, but they unfortunately cut out one of the WTF-iest moments (the catfight scene). The nearly-coherent editing exaggerates the surreal elements of the originals, while jettisoning a lot of blah filler. (Watching Dr. X unedited is recommended to cinema masochists only.)

Secondly, the two movies are not only edited, but manipulated. First off, synthy new 80s vintage soundtracks have been added— a pipe organ patch with a Casio keyboard beat underneath, that kind of thing. The digital doodling is more profound in the colorful Dr. X. Tracking errors and faded color are kept (and new ones are added), along with overlaid images: sometimes from other scenes from the original film, and sometimes from outside sources, so that suns and galaxies and landscapes and abstract dust storms occasionally play over the duller imagery. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is less altered than Dr. X—it plays straight for most of the time—but there are a few fun stylizations. One motif is that, in the more delirious second half, the mad doctor’s assistant is always shown in a different “film stock,” which looks like they played a battered VHS tape on a particularly staticky cathode tube TV set, filmed it with a cheap camcorder, and re-edited the new footage into the movie. Another cool idea is that when Jan’s severed head is monologizing, the “camera” does a slow zoom to focus directly on her mouth. Along with the soundtrack, these experiments supply the new reimagined content. I only wish they had pushed things even further. (The trailer is actually a little misleading, implying more video manipulation than actually shows up in the finished product.) The concept of using public domain B-movies as canvases for -type experiments is a thrilling one, and that potential is barely scratched here. Hopefully they will push the conceit further with the promised “Phantasmatapes 2.”

The Blu-ray includes uncut versions of both features, in VHS full-frame scans complete with lousy sound and picture quality. The Blu-ray wraps the whole package up with a commentary track from Choi and Ziemba and three nostalgia-themed shorts: a mini-documentary on the “Max Headroom” pirate signal broadcast from 1987, a supercut of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” scares, and another mini-doc on the early 80s moral panic around the Dungeons and Dragons game. All in all, this compilation will resonate strongly with a certain demographic—you probably have already decided if you’re in it—and is at least worthy of a gander for others.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other critics’ reviews located.

Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]

Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]
  • Region Free Blu-Ray
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: Peter Wechsberg

FEATURING: Peter Wechsberg (as Peter Wolf), Lee Darel, Dudley Hemstreet, James Randall

PLOT: In a universe where everyone communicates via American Sign Language (ASL), theology student Steve Adams discovers that he is the son of Dracula and has been leading a second life as a blood-thirsty vampire with a trail of bodies in his wake.

Still from deafula (1975)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even if it weren’t one of the first (and, to this day, one of the only) films made exclusively in ASL, Deafula’s imaginative presentation of a world where gestural speech is the lingua franca and its singular interpretation of the Dracula legend make it a movie that truly has no comparison.

COMMENTS: Let’s start with the remarkable durability of the Dracula myth. Vampires have lost none of their fascination even in our modern world (I’ve discussed this phenomenon before), and Dracula lords over them all, appearing in some form in more than 200 films. Unlike most of his classic horror brethren (werewolves, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein monsters, creatures from black lagoons and the like), Dracula is verbal, and even handsome, as likely to use seductive words as violent action to achieve his aims. So when an underrepresented community wants to tap into the mainstream, there’s probably no figure more iconic and adaptable and copyright-free than Dracula, standing by and ready to tell his tale once more. Blacula, anyone?

And so we come to Deafula, in which writer/director/star  Wechsberg endeavored to give the deaf community something they had never had: a popular entertainment of their very own. He conjured up a messily layered version of the story, with the fundamental vampire-kills-people plotline frequently taking a back seat to the hero’s fraught relationship with his father, a police procedural featuring a Van Helsing substitute whom everybody hates, and a substantial commitment to themes of religious devotion and divine punishment. We do get Dracula in this movie (as an appropriately imperious and condescending figure), but he’s not our star. Instead, our hero is a pretty average, milquetoast kind of guy who, when he transforms into a villain, looks less like a demonic force and more like a low-rent Svengoolie with a ridiculous fake nose.

It is impossible to divorce Deafula from the circumstances of its creation. A drama student at Gallaudet University, Wechsberg was drawn to the power of film, and after getting into some production work, he scraped enough money to make a movie his way, with the deaf audience in mind. (He also aspired to give deaf creators their due; the closing credits specifically distinguish the hearing-impaired performers from their hearing colleagues.) His inexperience shows, especially when it comes to action. He crafts a clever introduction to reveal his hero emerging from the vampire state, but afterward gets caught up in disjointed edits and inconsistent pacing. Deafula’s savage mind-control of a would-be robber should be evidence of his Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975) →