The House on Skull Mountain (1974)

Excellent, smart action film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

THE HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN is a familiar type of old-fashioned horror film with one twist: it's a blaxploitation movie too, with a cast populated almost entirely by black actors. Otherwise it's a rather slow and stately effort that delivers some rural horror inside a house haunted by voodoo and its effects.This story seems to deliberately hark back to the 'old dark house' films of the 1930s and reminded me a lot of THE HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES, although the thrills are more moody and less visceral. Once again the reading of a will is the main plot point and there's a great deal of atmosphere-building in the form of wandering around creepy old locations and characters suffering from weird dreams and manifestations.Those looking for blood will find this a slow, tame affair and will probably hate it, and it's fair to say that the voodoo ceremony climax is much like that of Hammer's THE WITCHES, merely a bunch of people dancing around in a basement, silly rather than shocking. However, I did find the film oddly appealing overall, with an atmosphere of regret and decay that works nicely in its favour.

Back in the 1970s, Mike Evans played the recurring character Lionel Jefferson on "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons". Eventually, he was replaced on "The Jeffersons" by a guy who looked nothing like him...and I always wondered why this happened. Well, after reading a bit, it seems that he quit acting temporarily in 1975 because he was the co-creator and writer for "Good Times". However, just before quitting acting, he accepted a leading role in "The House on Skull Mountain". Perhaps Evans should have considered giving up acting a year sooner-- since his role in the film was rather one dimensional and silly. Of course, the film itself is one dimensional and silly!!The film begins with an old black lady dying. Various relatives who don't know each other have all been invited to her estate for a reading of the old woman's will. However, before this occurs, there is a death--and things start to get really scary. Lots of snakes appear and disappear, the Grim Reaper keeps popping by to visit and there's an underground voodoo cult that meets there for their little dance parties. Who will survive the stay at Skull Mountain? If I had some distant relative die and I was invited to their estate at Skull Mountain, I might just think twice. After all, 'Skull Mountain' doesn't exactly sound like a friendly place! And, when various folks in the home start seeing weird hallucinations of death, you'd think they'd skedaddle--I sure know I would! But, being a cheesy exploitation film they don't and the results are rather predictable and silly. I also wonder if most Black-Americans who might watch this today might just feel a bit embarrassed by all this silliness and these stereotypes. And, it really is silly--just the sort of guilty pleasure bad movie fans might enjoy. Others, however, should watch at their own risk--Shakespeare this isn't!

***Spoilers*** Very disjointed and confusing Blackspolitation horror movie with very few real scares but loads of unintentional laughs in it. The movie has to do with a quartet of relatives of the what looks like 100 plus year old lady of the house on Skull Mountain Pauline Christophe played by Mary J. Todd McKenzie in her both first and last film appearance who are called over to hear the reading of the will that Pauline left them before she passed away.The big joke or was it a mistake on the film makers part is that the will is never read! This made all the tension in the movie in who's to get what among Pauline last living relatives never fully realized or exploited. We do get to see a great, the by far best scene in the film, voodoo snake dance choreographed by the houses wild eyed butler Thomas, Jean Durand, with about two dozen voodoo worshipers that if you think about it has really nothing at all to do with the films already confusing storyline! Which has to do with who gets what in the will that's to be read by Payline's personal attorney Mr. Ledaux, Leroy Johnson, who's after his initial appearances in the movie just seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth!The big hero in the movie happened to be the black or better yet white sheep in the Christophe family anthropology professor Andrew Cunningham,Victor French, who's been studying voodoo for years and has some idea of what's really going on in the movie. Cunningham is also looking for his roots in that he's not really sure who is his in that his birth records and whom his parents are have somehow been lost in the shuffle! This all has Cunningham not really knowing if he's either black or white or even,in the slight slant in his eyes, Oriental for that matter!***SPOILERS*** About the biggest surprise in the film has to do with Butler Thomas who's trying to take over the house on Skull Mountain and become the big man in the local voodoo cult that both he and the house chambermaid Louette, Ela Woods,founded! For some strange reason Thomas ends up sacrificing Louette in a wild voodoo snake charming ceremony and with that tries to resurrect the dead Pauline, a voodoo practitioner herself, back to life to consolidate his power! As it turned out there's only room for one voodoo leader on Skull Mountain which an grossly overconfident Thomas was to find out the hard way with Pauline finally putting an end to his deranged and crazed plans!

Although I thought that "The House on Skull Mountain" was overall a fairly neat movie, I wish that it had featured more action. And people need to realize that voodoo is more than just people sticking pins in dolls; voodoo is a religion. Of course, there can never be too many movies about haunted houses.The plot is that an elderly African-American woman dies and a couple of people are invited to her house near Atlanta. Sure enough, there are bad things going on in this house. I thought that Phillippe was sort of a cliché (alcoholic wise guy), but he was the neatest character in the movie! Anyway, there's nothing special about this movie.