Dis­cov­er the final hor­ror from one of the genre’s unsung greats

After a pro­logue show­ing woods at night, and a car dri­ving away from a pair of bloody, naked bod­ies lying besides a fall­en motor­cy­cle, Dead­ly Manor (aka Sav­age Lust) cuts to a truck dri­ving in broad day­light with a giant stat­ue of a burg­er-bear­ing ​‘Big Boy’ mas­cot (from the pop­u­lar Amer­i­can restau­rant chain) as its haul.

This is a way for Span­ish direc­tor José Ramón Lar­raz not just to offer a fore­taste of the mur­der­ous per­ver­sion to come, but also to estab­lish the set­ting of his film, like its pre­de­ces­sor Edge of the Axe, in an Amer­i­ca that is – in more than one sense – gener­ic. For, deriv­a­tive and not a lit­tle dull, Dead­ly Manor is horror’s equiv­a­lent of fast food, deliv­er­ing exact­ly what view­ers expect in por­tion-con­trolled, bland form.

The film was actu­al­ly shot in upstate New York, but Lar­raz might equal­ly, as with his pre­vi­ous fea­tures, have filmed all or parts of it in his home coun­try. After all, while the remote and spooky man­sion house of the title may boast among its fea­tures, as one char­ac­ter absurd­ly puts it in a recap seem­ing­ly designed for the trail­er, ​“a smashed car out­side, coffins in the base­ment, and scalps in the clos­et,” the one thing it nev­er accom­mo­dates is authenticity.

The sense of arti­fice that quick­ly set­tles in is essen­tial to the film’s charm, as are some high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic touch­es in the over-the-top cli­max – although else­where, the poor act­ing and tone-deaf, nuance-free dia­logue will have you dying for more red sauce just to make it seem less like an insipid, pro­duc­tion-line offering.

Mys­te­ri­ous hitch­hik­er Jack (Clark Tufts) gets off the truck, and thumbs a ride with six pass­ing co-eds who are hop­ing that he will help guide them to Lake Wapakonope where they intend to go camp­ing. Savvy view­ers will recog­nise two dis­tinct direc­tions that this open­ing appears to be tak­ing: the hitch­hik­er hell from the begin­ning of The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre and the lake­side slash­ing of Fri­day the 13^th. Before it can get to either of these des­ti­na­tions, Rod (Mark Irish) will turn off the high­way look­ing for a place to rest for the night.

“Do you know where this roads leads to?” asks the group’s most ner­vous mem­ber Helen (Clau­dia Fran­jul), artic­u­lat­ing the ques­tion that view­ers may also be ask­ing them­selves. In a sense it is obvi­ous­ly lead­ing to the manor house promised by the title, but even when it gets there, the char­ac­ters keep sug­gest­ing estab­lished hor­ror tem­plates for a sce­nario that has not yet revealed its true identity.

So Peter (Jer­ry Kernion) – who wears a Godzil­la T‑shirt to sig­ni­fy his sta­tus as a hor­ror fan – sug­gests jok­ing­ly that the fig­ure whom only Helen saw at the upstairs win­dow might be ​“a bio­haz­ard mutant zom­bie”; and when Helen insists that the house is ​“evil”, Peter again mocks her with an explic­it ref­er­ence to The Exor­cist: ​“Maybe you’ll spit up peas soup and your head’ll turn around!” Peter express­ly alludes to Drac­u­la even before they dis­cov­er the two coffins (marked ​‘Aman­da’ and ​‘Alfred’) in the base­ment, and lat­er won­ders aloud: ​“What next? Uncle Fes­ter on the patio?”

There are oth­er ele­ments of the manor that fit none of these pre­scribed genre mod­els: the burnt-out car placed like a mon­u­ment on a con­crete pedestal out­side the house; or the inte­ri­or walls fes­tooned with pic­tures of the same pret­ty (but ​“cru­el” look­ing) woman; or the clos­et full of human scalps (which bare­ly fazes any­one); or the crack that keeps vis­i­bly expand­ing along a plas­ter wall; or the masked woman who enters the sex­u­al fan­tasies of sleep­ing Tony (Greg Rhodes), or appears at the window.

Amid all the char­ac­ters’ spec­u­la­tive ban­ter about the pre­cise nature of the film that we are watch­ing, what we do know (and they do not) is that their num­bers are being rapid­ly reduced, slash­er-style, by some­one armed with a knife. Yet, in a sense, this is ulti­mate­ly a sort of vam­pire film too. For its evil is not just a cou­ple of deranged house own­ers (William Rus­sell, Jen­nifer Delo­ra), but also fad­ed, decay­ing beau­ty venge­ful­ly prey­ing upon the vital­i­ty of youth.

The prob­lem, though, is in the exe­cu­tion – both lit­er­al­ly, in the drea­ry rep­e­ti­tion of the throat slit­tings, and more metaphor­i­cal­ly, in the by-num­bers plot­ting, non-exis­tent char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, per­func­to­ry lines and poor per­for­mances. An estab­lished mae­stro of mood in films like Symp­toms and Vampyres, Lar­raz cer­tain­ly squeezes all the goth­ic atmos­phere that he can from his coun­try-house loca­tion, and play­ful­ly mis­di­rects view­ers in a know­ing man­ner with a range of sub­vert­ed hor­ror tropes. And if you get through the long, mean­der­ing mid­dle sec­tion, the end­ing is insane.

Still, the feel­ing remains that this is far from Larraz’s best work, and that he too, along with the film’s antag­o­nists, is strug­gling impos­si­bly against aes­thet­ic decline. Dead­ly Manor was to be Larraz’s final Amer­i­can film. He made just one more fea­ture, the Span­ish cop com­e­dy Sevil­la Con­nec­tion, before retir­ing per­ma­nent­ly from filmmaking.

Dead­ly Manor is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video in a brand new 2K restora­tion from the orig­i­nal film ele­ments on 17 February.