A NAME FOR EVIL (1973)

 "GO AWAY!  IT'S MINE!" 

Here's a movie that I thought was a seventies TV horror movie but wasn't.  It's actually by Penthouse Productions.  I mean, is that Penthouse Penthouse???  I mean, I think it is because there's bouncing bahzooms in it.  Robert Culp (no stranger to TV movies himself) plays architect John Blake who gets tired of the rat race and takes his wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) to the country to renovate his great-grandfather 'The Major''s old house.  Unfortunately, the Major (or the house itself -- or both) don't want them there.  A shadowy figure keeps creepy around the corners of the house saying "Go away! It's mine!" to John Blake.  Now, Blake seems to be a couple blueprints short of an architectural firm.  His relationship wit his wife seems to be a little . . . shall we say 'hallucinatory' and he keeps 'imagining' her in different guises.  I think.  I'm not sure. 

It's all rather too hippy-dippy-trippy to make much sense of it.  Then there's a local church that seems . . . well, rather odd as well.  All this goes on and on for a while and there's a dreamy, 'nightmare logic'-type of atmosphere over all this.  It's all rather pointedly 'enigmatic' and a little trying-of-da-patience, if you get my drift.  I'm also pretty sure we get a glimpse of Robert Culp's 'ole fellah' at one point.  I mean, we certainly see his bare butt, that's for sure, and I wasn't really prepared for any of this. Oh wait.  Yeah, there's Lil Robert Culp, all right.  I've used a lot of quotation marks so far and I think they're quite appropriate as far as A NAME FOR EVIL is concerned.  More than a horror film, it's trying to be an 'arty' horror film and those don't always work out well.  Any spooky feeling or atmosphere is jettisoned in favour of an ethereal artiness which the director doesn't really have the chops to pull off.  Said director is Bernard Girard who gave us DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND (which I've seen) and THE MAD ROOM (which I haven't).  I mean, there's one scene where Robert Culp rides a horse into a pseudo-orgy and some guys carry out platters full of unsauced spaghetti which the partygoers maniacally grasp with their hands like wild animals.  This is the kind of thing moviemakers do to 'seem' arty and enigmatic without really putting any meaning behind it.  After the 'spaghetti incident' (See what I did there?), some square-dancing ensues. 

Robert & Samantha wondering when the horror film is gonna start

We're 50 minutes into the movie and there's been precious little haunted house actions as yet.  Instead, we have a guitarist sing a soft rock song at this point.  Our moviemakers obviously don't know what contemporary young people get up to at orgies.  Don't get me wrong, there IS an orgy with nekkid people flopping about -- this is why I think Penthouse Productions means THAT Penthouse.  However, after everyone strips off, they commence to doing some sort of gymnastics; flipping people head over tin cups.  I dunno but this isn't how I thought orgies were conducted.  Then there's Robert Culp's hilariously trendy late-sixties outfits.  I love 1970's fashion but THIS is what people think of when they think of really BAD seventies fashion.  Trust me, we didn't wear this stuff.   I can only wish that the film had been made a year or two later when the sixties trippy hangover had dissipated and we would have been given a more atmospheric, spooky haunted house flick.  I'm simply left with a movie that tries to show how hip and with-it everyone is but actually seems very unhip and clueless.  The biggest question I have about this film is not all this stuff but how they managed to get Dominic Frontiere to score the film.  Frontiere scored the classic TV series THE OUTER LIMITS and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what he's doing here.  All this doesn't really address the 'horror movie' aspects of A NAME FOR EVIL but there just isn't enough of that to address.  I mean, hey it wasn't a total loss.  I got to see Robert Culp's knob and that's something I thought I'd go through my entire life without having to see.