To give this masterpiece a 6.8 out of 10,is to under-rate it.This film offers an imaginative and atmospheric viewing experience - and does not resemble a Hammer horror film by any means. Unlike "The Haunting," the above film actually delivers what it promises - chills, thrills and suspense. A rare British film in Roddy McDowall's career - he takes the acting honours but all the cast do well.Richard Matheson adapting his own book is all for the good. I like the Gothic look that this film has.

At first sight, The Legend of Hell House, is a flabby knock-off of the much, much better The Haunting (of Hill House), so much so that you would assume that the lawyers would be locked and loaded for battle.The story is murky, the actors are given thankless things to do and say, and the explanation for the pervo-gory ickiness of the "Mount Everest of haunted houses" is just not strong enough.But danged if the movie doesn't keep you watching!It may have been the weird synthesized background music and/or the disorienting lack of continuity between the time stamps on screen and the light or darkness outside and/or the actually sympathetic characters played by the two female leads, but I got some decent thrill/chills from this fairly atmospheric and jittery little horror flick.Made a decade after the brilliant Robert Wise production of The Haunting, the movie earns what would now be a PG-13 from the gore, the flashes of skin, and the general yick that saturates the English mansion in question. Its denouement is fairly pedestrian, but the viewer has some reason to be forgiving. You actually feel sad when the sexy-as-a-pop-tart Pamela Franklin gets crushed under a giant crucifix, and Gail Hunnicutt, all funky facial angles and swollen eyes, who loves her sexually disinterested scientist husband, comes under the influence of the nasty ol' dude slithering around the afterlife in the mansion, and acts as if anything hard and cylindrical will do just fine. If this were an R, I swear she would have started dry-humping one of the columns of the old house.The Legend of Hill House is a moderately competent psychological night-bumper, and I figure, if you see it advertised on FXM, well, why not? There's actual brain-like substance here.

If you see this after you see "The Haunting" (1963), you'll recognize this to be a somewhat flaky adaptation of the original brilliant work. While the photography is stunning, everything else falls short. Character development is deplorable, the plot is at times overdressed and at others simplified to the point of stupidity, and the scares are by modern AND classic standards, not that scary.Dr. Barrett and Ann Barrett, the two lead investigators are uninteresting characters, offering little to no wisdom or insight and deliver dull insipid performances much like their supposed sex life in the movie. By the end I sympathized with Tanner for throwing that paranormal tantrum at Dr. Barrett, and Tanner, well she's a whole new class of two-dimensional. She remains entrenched in her own convictions while making one stupid decision after another, to the point where you actually want to believe she's on to something to allow the movie more depth than it actually has. Fischer is the only interesting one of the bunch, and that's because he remains aloof and observant throughout the movie. By the end he does deliver a commendable performance, but the plot by then has devolved into something absurd. Still he makes the best of what he is left to work with.There are no explanations to the REAL questions. Who is the corpse tied in the dungeon, what bearing does Bolesco's colorful crimes have on the story, what in Tanner's history enables her to fall in love with a spirit, why was Dr Barrett attacked in the living room when all spirit influence had been removed from there, and why does the knowledge of Bolesco's height complex allow them to find him?IF you want to experience the REAL horrors of Hell House, watch the Haunting.

This was filmed in the UK and consciously done so in black and white. I think it was a good choice. The directing is well done, the acting is very good, and the special effects are kept to a minimum and are basic. Two psychics, one the only survivor of a previous attempt to find out about the house, the other young woman. There is also a scientist and his wife. The scientist has brought a machine that is suppose to remove any ghostly presence. As things progress the evil of the house manifests itself in various ways. It attacks the woman psychic a couple of times and goes after the wife. They find a shackled, dessicated body at one point. The malevolent spirit fools them into believing it is the ghost of his son. The scientist eventually runs his machine and it doesn't work. The scientist is killed in a bizarre ethereal attack. Roddy McDowall is the survivor from the first time and he finally has it figured out. He turned the on again and this time it gets rid of the badness.