The House on Skull Mountain is pretty much everything you want in ’70s cinema: stylistic horror, blaxploitation, Victor French with a porn ’stache. The story goes that an old, Haitian, voodoo priestess has died in her mansion atop a mountain (shaped like a skull, natch) in eastern Georgia (look for it in finer guide books right next to Stone Mountain). She leaves the place and a couple of eerie servants to a quartet of distant relations: prim Lorena (Janee Michelle), jive-talking Phillippe (Mike Evans), God-fearing Harriet (Xernona Clayton) and inexplicably white Andrew (French).
The movie, of course, realizes that Andrew’s racial heritage needs accounting for and explains that that’s actually why he’s there. He was adopted and is jumping at the chance to learn about his real family. Unfortunately, he runs late to the reading of the will, and the lawyer’s not set to return for another week. Plenty of time for everyone to settle in and start dying.
Phillipe is a creepy fool who drunkenly hits on Cousin Lorena; Harriet is a timid housemaid who sees visions of death. Lorena and Andrew quickly form a relationship that may or may not be romantic (I choose “not,” because it allows me to continue judging Phillipe while still liking the two leads), giving this House some appeal that it probably doesn’t deserve. There’s nothing overtly sexual in the way they act around each other; they’re just extremely comfortable in one another’s company and encourage each other in more ways than simply trying to stay alive. There’s a particularly sweet scene where Andrew complains about not knowing anything about himself: “I don’t even know what color I am.”
“Oh, Andrew. Is that really important?”
“You know that it’s not,” he says. Convincingly, too. “But I’d like to know.”
It’s nice to see since they were so obviously lonely people before they showed up in voodoo country. I’m not sure that Georgia actually is voodoo country, but we’ll run with it. At any rate, the sweetness of their relationship raises the stakes for both Andrew and the audience when Lorena becomes the next to be drummed out. —Michael May