Witchcraft and insanity have been part of the Desard family for centuries. The current family patriarch is Andre Desard (John Carradine). He and his brother Belial Desard (Lon Chaney Jr.) have been feuding over the family estate for years. Both are warlocks. Belial is the head of a coven of witches. His disciples come from the nearby village of Widderburn. The residents of the town are descendants of slaves that worked for the Desards. Andre has two children Paul (Tom Drake) and Valerie (Dolores Faith). Belial is trying to bewitch them and bring them into his coven.
Andre is ill and mostly bedridden. He sends for Dr. Eric Campion (Jerome Thor), a parapsychologist, and Dr. Katherine Mallory (Andrea King), a psychiatrist. Campion is well known by the family as he was once engaged to Valerie and is still in love with her. There have been some deaths in the village that are being blamed on a werewolf. The town’s people believe that Paul is the werewolf.
Using his black magic Belial actually does turn Paul into a werewolf. His plans for Valerie are also nefarious. Andre and Eric must save Valerie before she too is marked.
“House of the Black Death” AKA “Blood of the Man Devil” was released in 1965 and was directed by Harold Daniels, Reginald Le Borg and Jerry Warren. It is an American low budget horror film based on the novel “The Widderburn Horror” by Lora Crozetti.
The producers weren’t happy with how Daniels was directing the film so they brought in Jerry Warren to finish it. Reginald Le Borg also directed some scenes. Both Warren and Le Borg were uncredited. Le Borg did a few things I liked, for example “Diary of a Madman” 1963 and “The Black Sleep” 1956 and several other films. Warren brought you such gems as “The Incredible Petrified World” 1959 and “Teenage Zombies” 1959. What Warren is most noted for is buying the rights to Mexican movies and doing a Roger Corman style cut and paste on them, thereby rendering them useless as quality entertainment. Daniels hadn’t done a lot of films but he did direct “Port Sinister” 1953, a hard to find film that, although not great, could have been a contender for cult status.
The film, which was done on a shoestring, was done in black and white during a time where most horror movies were beginning to be done in color. The fact that three directors had their fingers in the film makes the end result rather scattered and disjointed. OK, very scattered and disjointed. The ending is a little ambiguous but that could be due to Warren. Luckily for Carradine and Chaney they are never on screen together so neither one has to worry about being upstaged while the other is overacting. The film doesn’t have much of anything to rave about. What the film does have is a guy with horns and a cloven foot, a werewolf and lots of belly dancing.
There are a couple versions out there. The original movie is about an hour and twenty-nine minutes long. I found one that is only an hour and thirteen minutes long. That means and additional sixteen minutes are cut out of a movie that already isn’t very good. I can’t say how much of the film being disjointed is because it is missing those sixteen minutes and how much because of the parade of bad directors that were involved. I suspect that the only good part about the film missing sixteen minutes is that it means the torture of watching it is shorter. I haven’t been able to find the film in its full length yet. Granted I’m not looking that hard for it but if I stumble across it I will download it and check it out.