Newz/Review – “Burnt Offerings” (1976)
Hello Gorehounds, and Horror-fiends,
We are back with you for another installment of the 3rd Floor Movie Club’s review and entertainment blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy and find something useful or fun about the site. If so, please feel free to comment below and tell us what you like or love about what we do here. If you don’t like us, my lawyer’s name and number will be below as well too. Kidding.
Anyways, on to the business at hand. Since most people have 2 hands, we have two pieces of business for you today. The first is rather interesting and cursory, so we will start there. We think that you may enjoy this piece of information. As you may know, many of us here at the 3FMC are huge, huge, fans of movies, and especially the ones that scare the hydration out of us all. In fact, we love movies so much, we are going to take it a step further than just reporting our opinions of them. We here at the 3FMC have decided that we are going to move towards making our own films. How do we plan on doing that, you ask? We are going to get together a movie production company, and go from there. Quite a number of us are already involved in film, TV, radio, or theatre as it is, so when we put that all together, we may have more than just critics. Therefore, there will be a new site on the way for our production company, whether it be for movies, stories, screenplays, or other trinkets for the purpose of us producing wonderful ideas to keep you up all night. Stay tuned for more information on this as it becomes available.
Secondly, we would like to review a film for the masses this evening. One of my favorite subgenres in horror, and one that has few winners in it – Haunted House. While a film like the original Poltergeist still takes the World Belt of haunted house movies, there are less than a handful out there that we would say could even stand in the driveway of Poltergeist. One of the films that had a lot going for it, was panned when it came out, was a box-office bomb, had a great cast, but has garnered a better following in later years was Burnt Offerings.
Summary: What we have is the story of a writer named Ben (Oliver Reed in his first US film), his wife, Marian (Karen Black), their 12 year old son, Davey (Lee Montgomery, star of Ben, and The Midnight Hour) who look at renting a dilapidated mansion for the summer off of a rather eccentric brother and sister (Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart) who are willing to let the family rent the home for the entire summer for the bargain-basement price of $900. The only request: That they feed the shut-in mother of theirs that lives on the top floor of the home and never goes out. Agreeing to the terms, the couple enters the home and begins to make it their own. And as the more perceptive of you will know, that’s when things start to get weird and unusual for the family. Broken lights fix themselves on their own, areas where the house was looking bad and banged up start to repair themselves, and even after the family’s Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) comes to the home, and eventually dies, the home starts to look even better than before.
Discussion: As with most good horror films that have been made over the years, they come from novels, and Burnt Offerings was no different, except that the novel wasn’t good either (according to quite a few, including the director). Having seen the film for the first time this past weekend, we very much liked it. Even though Oliver Reed seemed out of place being in that type of film, he did a splendid job, and is one of our favorite actors of all-time. Definitely underrated, and not one of the films that loaded up on splatter and special fx. This one got the job done on visuals, atmosphere, music, and genuine creepiness. The ending was pretty good and definitely one that made you walk away going “Ohhh, so that’s how it was.” I felt that this film had a lot in common with the film that came out 2 yrs later called The Legacy, starring Sam Elliot. Both films were not as well received back then as they may be today. And both films certainly are not as low-quality as most of the horror that greets us on the screens nowadays.
Rating: Being a little more kind than the initial critics, we give the film 3.5 out of 5 stars. Definitely a good film to pair with The Legacy or even Legend of Hell House. Enjoy!
-3FMC
#blood #cinema #critic #discussion #film #haunted #Horror #horrorMovies #scary #sciFi #slasher #terror
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