Magician John Harley Duquesne (Cesar Romero) is working on a guillotine trick despite his wife assistant Melinda Duquesne (Connie Stevens). She disappears and he retires at the height of his popularity. Twenty years later, he dies but vows to return from the dead. His estranged daughter Cassie Duquesne (Connie Stevens) inherits the entire estate with the stipulation that she must spend seven nights in his mansion. Val Henderson (Dean Jones) is a lying reporter interested in her family story.

It's got a big mansion. It's got silly scares. Some are meant to be silly like bad magic tricks. The problem with that is they make the whole movie rather cheesy. There are no actual scary moments and everything feels like bad magic tricks. The other issue is spreading the time out to seven nights. The horror would work better concentrated on one night. The days break up any scary situations and only serves the budding romance. The main problem with the romance is that he's a lying liar. It makes it hard to ship them. It doesn't work as a horror and it struggles to work as a romance. The movie takes turns trying to advance one side and then the other. The secret premise holds some promise. The romance almost works. The movie doesn't.

You must decapitate rather than anticipate what falls off in this late entry into the "Old Dark House" prototype, a rip-off of the type of film that William Castle was doing years before with more wit. Cesar Romero takes over a Vincent Price role as the magician whose wife allegedly disappeared years before after he "perfected" a guillotine trick. Now deceased with every intent of coming back from the dead, he has left his spooky Hollywood Hills home to his daughter (Connie Stevens, who also appears briefly as Romero's wife) left to an aunt to raise and now an heiress with $300,000 coming to her, as long as she can spend seven nights in the mansion filled with skeletons, mischievous bunnies, and his father's drunken mistress and attorney who for some reason read the will on the stages of the Hollywood Bowl. (Is that so reporters over in Pasadena can hear them?)

Along comes mysterious young man Dean Jones with an interest in Stevens that you are not sure is romantic, financial or nefarious. The drunken mistress (Virginia Gregg) singles him out as a gold-digger, and Stevens can't make up her mind whether she loves him or despises him as certain facts are made known about him. The "wascally wabbit" (this is a Warner Brothers film after all) pushes a box down the stairs which contains a duplicate of Stevens' head, a brawny housekeeper (Connie Gilchrist) starts and quits on the same day (being pushed to a fainting spell by the fake skeleton and waking up to find herself being kissed by the bunny),and visions of the dead dad keep appearing. If this was made in 1930, before the original "Old Dark House" (in itself a variation of "The Cat and the Canary"),this might be the best horror comedy of the year, but after "The Tingler", "The House on Haunted Hill", "The Haunting" and "The Bat", this seems really old hat.

Still, there are a few gags to laugh with (or at),and there is a slight sense of creepiness that makes you forgive the film for its repetition of old ideas. However, the actors, while not openly laughing, seem to know that they're reading from a ridiculously silly script. If it wasn't for the silly rabbit, tricks would be for Romero!

This is one of those films from 1965 that my friends and I went to in our small-town movie theater. I remember it as being full of those jump-out-at-you moments with people in the theater screaming. Connie Stevens is the heir to her father's estate but must stay in the old house for seven days. He is one of the great magicians of his time and has promised, upon his death, to return to the house. The house itself is great fun, full of remnants of his magic world. There is a cabinet that opens when a switch is flipped, allowing a skeleton on a wire to come face to face with the unwary victim. The guillotine in question is part of the act that killed the man's wife and assistant. Stevens then was farmed out and never saw her father again. She also never knew what happened to her mother. It's full of fun stuff with a plot that shouldn't be too closely evaluated. There are two characters that are left out of the will who become suspects. What they really know is always in doubt. Connie Stevens was a cute TV star at the time and well worth watching and makes a good victim. She is stubborn on the one hand and terrified on the other. She can also scream with the best of them. Dean Jones (a long time Disney staple) plays the love interest.