Here's a run-of-the-mill haunted house flick which isn't actually bad, just boring. The film runs for over a hundred minutes see, and only thirty minutes of that time is made up of action. The rest of the film is padded with unnecessary surreal dream sequences (usually showing the lead character naked or in bed, go figure),lots of talk about nothing in particular and people going about their daily lives. Now, with a bit of snappy editing and some more suspense, this could have been a great movie.

As it is, we're left with a slow-paced film which has some good scares occurring at irregular intervals. A string of gore murders (following scenes which seem to take an age to actually get to the action) is included for the genre fan to enjoy, with various victims getting scythes in faces, getting impaled through the eyes with railings and, in a fantastic shock scene, dragged into the still waters of a lake by rotting hands which rise up out of nowhere. The ghosts don't really haunt their mansion as such, instead appearing in dreams or to play music or pop up and smash a window occasionally.

The film is heavy on atmosphere, complemented by some effectively spooky music and an interesting setting in the octagonal mansion. The usual technical errors you will find in a low budget film are present (here it's mainly continuity errors) but there's nothing majorly wrong with it. The cast is primarily made up of unknowns, although genre veteran John Carradine makes a welcome appearance as an old man who spends half of his scenes lingering in a wheelchair and the other half lingering in his deathbed! Robin Groves is okay as the female lead, more down-to-earth and realistic than most, but she does display an annoying tendency to scream too much in the final act. Sadly the male leads (on the side of good) are generally wooden and it's left to Bill Rowley and David Tabor to ham it up enjoyably as weird rednecks.

It's a shame that this movie is pretty hard to sit through, because it closes with a bang-in-your-face ending which really does make you sit up in your seat. The genuinely horrific finale is a flashback to when the former inhabitants of the mansion (prostitutes) are murdered by a trio of angry townsfolk. This is powerful stuff as we watch the men go from room to room, slaughtering innocent (of crime, that is) folk in their wake. The best scene in the movie, but it's a shame that there's so much twaddle to sit through before you get to it. You could do worse, though, I suppose.

The late 70's and early 80's saw a surprising rash of entertainingly trashy low-budget haunted house chiller dillers, resulting in the vigorously pulpy "The Evil," the not half bad "The Hearse," the dreary "Death Ship," the enjoyably sleazy "The House Where Evil Dwells," and this pleasingly lurid outing, which starts out pretty low-key and unsettling before delightfully degenerating into a wildly frantic and gruesome over-the-top shockfest.

Lauren Cochran (a deeply sympathetic performance by the wispily attractive Robin Groves) is a hugely successful, but extremely repressed and neurotic author of Gothic novels who suffers from severe agoraphobia. So Lauren decides to take a load off and subsequently acquire a firmer hold on her shaky sanity by taking a much-needed vacation in the country. Lauren holes up in a musty, dingy, dilapidated old Victorian mansion that turns out to be a onetime bordello haunted by the vengeful, insanely laughing specter of the red-haired madame (the ever-sultry Gloria Grahame in her last film role). When Lauren tries to find out about the squalid abode's grimy past history, several seedy secondary male characters meet ghastly untimely ends and Lauren herself gets manipulated by the unrestful spirits of prostitutes murdered in the house decades ago to exact a brutal revenge on the people responsible for the massacre.

Former porno filmmaker Armand Weston, who did both the capable direction and co-wrote the solid, twisty, engrossingly sordid script, initially opts for a quietly nerve-rattling and unexpectedly delicate things are slightly out of whack eerie and mysterious mood, what with windows strangely breaking, a Victrola suddenly playing in the dead of night, Lauren experiencing horrific nightmares, cryptic messages left on Lauren's typewriter, and the ghost of the madame making sporadic jarring manifestations. Then the killings begin about halfway through and the film starts laying on the crudely visceral shocks something thick, thus making this one of those rare fright flicks that manages the tricky feat of blending an ambiguously creepy-crawly atmosphere with more bluntly presented jump-out-at-you scare tactics with praiseworthy effectiveness. The noodling synthesizer score by Jack Malkin and Kim Scholes and Joao Fernandes' gloomy cinematography contribute greatly to the overall gooesepimply spookiness while old reliable John Carradine turns in his customary robust cameo as a cranky, wheelchair-bound town elder with a few dirty skeletons in his fiercely guarded closet. Moreover, the sex, nudity and violence quotient is reasonably high, therefor making this picture satisfyingly scuzzy exploitation fare as well. Plus there's a thoughtful and provocative underlying subtext concerning closure and catharsis that's neatly integrated into the story. With all these things working in its favor, this feature overall sizes up as an unjustly neglected sleeper that's well worth checking out.

Typical horror flick: a woman (Robin Groves) goes to an abandoned house to work on a novel, and - bingo! - it turns out to be a haunted house. In this case, it was a brothel during WWII.

Now that I'm old enough to think about this, it may or may not be worth noting. "The Nesting" was released (onto video, at least) through Warner Bros. When I was really young, I watched a lot of the old Looney Tunes cartoons - in fact, I still like to watch them whenever possible - and so I quickly familiarized myself with the name "Warner Bros." Well, over the course of my life, I found out that Warner Bros. also released other kinds of movies, among them horror flicks such as "The Exorcist", "The Shining", "The Awakening" and this one (for non-horror, they also released "A Clockwork Orange"). Had I known when I was three and four years old that Warner Bros. released these sorts of movies - particularly "The Shining" - I probably would have asked something like "Why did Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck make that movie where the man makes a scary face?" OK, so that's all flagrant, maybe criminal, digression. And most people would probably never even think about it. It's just that I like to talk about these things. Anyway, it's an OK movie, not anything great, though the house was pretty neat. Also starring John Carradine and Gloria Grahame (in her final role).

Still, it's weird to think that from the same source of Sylvester chasing Tweety came a movie about a Devil-possessed girl.