BURNT OFFERINGS
Disappointing

  I'd heard a lot of good things about this, as I had with the last haunted-house movie I saw, The Legend Of Hell House.  Hell House I didn't much like, but there was a lot of unmistakable merit in there and I'm willing to concede that maybe it caught me on an off day.  Burnt Offerings, however, bored me damn near to death.

Karen "Count the wigs" Black and Oliver Reed star as a couple with one 12-year-old boy (Lee Montgomery) who move into a big old country mansion for the summer with Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis).  There's an 85-year-old woman living upstairs, but she shouldn't be any trouble, yeah, right.  Soon Reed starts acting strangely and having visions and dreams of his mother's funeral.

I can't describe how bloody slow this movie is.  It's bad enough that half the film looks like it's shot through some sort of gauze.  This movie dodders along for two hours with its "thrills" consisting of scenes like the wife who doesn't want to have sex, or (here's a surprise) the kid who doesn't know how to swim trying to swim.  Its worst attempt at suspense has to be a scene where one character, having been catatonic in this movie for all of five minutes, makes a triumphant (if useless) return to full mobility.  Okay, the first time we see Reed's visions, I couldn't help but laugh because I could have sworn that the hearse driver was none other than Kato from The Green Hornet.

The cast is all fine, I suppose.  And Reed, while he was a ham, he was a great ham, and he's always an enjoyable screen presence.  He gets a great exit too, although the otherwise good ending would have been more effective without its bombast.  It's just a shame that there's scarcely anything to work with here.

Directed (and cowritten) by Dan Curtis.  If you have to watch, watch with the fast-forward button in easy reach.  Apparently, the mansion was also used as the mortuary in Phantasm.

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