Years in the making, Hollywood Horror House (aka Savage Intruder) represents the singular vision of Donald Wolfe — its writer, director and producer — in his one and only feature. That he never made another is a damn shame, but perhaps it’s not for a lack of trying. This one, after all, was funded by his Movieland Tours business, a virtual ad for which bookends the film, as a bus pulls up long enough for the driver (The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser) to point out the old mansion up the hill and in disrepair.
There lives faded matinee idol Katharine Packard (the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Miriam Hopkins, in her final role), her days now drowned in vodka, fairy-godmother gowns and clouded memories of being somebody. Off the tour bus hops homeless hippie Vic Valance (John David Garfield, White Line Fever) and gets a job as Katharine’s live-in caretaker. She’s thrilled to have such a handsome young man around; he’s thrilled to have lucked into a meal ticket, even if that means becoming her sexual plaything. It does.
Katharine is completely oblivious to Vic’s true self: a Satan-worshipping, smack-shooting serial killer who favors the electric carving knife. A former foster child, Vic projects his considerable mommy issues onto Katharine the more he undergoes drug-induced freakouts-cum-flashbacks, rendered onscreen in rather intoxicating kaleidoscopic visuals using every color of the Crayola box — the 64-count with built-in sharpener, of course. These effects are quite good, as are the practical effects depicting viscous torrents of blood jutting from lopped appendages.
A lot goes on under the roof of Hollywood Horror House, a real generation gap of a film. It’s a study in contrasts, particularly of artifice and honesty, starting with a shot of the glamorous landmark Hollywood sign, revealed to be heavily decayed as the camera switches to a close-up. No instance is accidental; hitting most wickedly is a family enjoying a Christmas parade while an L.A. business behind them advertises in bright orange-red letters, “TOTAL NUDITY.”
On that note, Hopkins briefly bares her sexagenarian breasts in one scene, part of her total commitment to a bravura performance, because if the one-time Academy Award nominee held any reservations about appearing in a B picture late in her career (Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill being another), she doesn’t show it. In fact, given the awards success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Hopkins thought she had a solid shot at an Oscar nod.
Wolfe’s film is hagsploitation without the marquee name value. It’s also a nice surprise. The last half grows incrementally more sluggish as the cast thins … until Vic goes totally bonkers, and the movie willfully, wonderfully follows. —Rod Lott