DEADLY MANOR

Directed by José Ramón Larraz. Spain. 1990.

Spanish genre director Jose Ramon Larraz made three mini-masterpieces in his career: his salaciously sapphic vampire flick VAMPYRES, the delectably depraved sexploitation shocker WHIRLPOOL, and hypnotically haunting SYMPTOMS starring Angela “the daughter of Donald” Pleasence. Then there’s DEADLY MANOR. It doesn’t deserve fancy alliterative adjectives. It doesn’t deserve total scorn either. Like Larraz’s other late career slasher, EDGE OF THE AXE, DEADLY MANOR isn’t a catastrophe or a blunder, more like a stumble or a trip up the stairs.

Three couples (Tony and Helen, Rod and Susan, and Peter and Anne) are heading to an idyllic lake in upstate New York for the weekend. Along the way, they pick up a pretty boy hitchhiker named Jack. Unbeknownst to the group, their new travel companion is an escaped convict packing a loaded gun. This will go nowhere and amount to nothing, so forget I ever said anything. They’re lost, and a flustered Rod asks Tony, the navigator, where to go. Tony scoffs. “Who am I? Gene Dixon?” he says. I have no idea who that is.

Feeling like I’d miss a good joke, I paused the film for a little internet sleuthing. I typed “Gene Dixon” into Google and started reading. I found a LinkedIn profile, a half dozen obituaries, and an AI-generated biography of someone with a fairly unremarkable life. Something was wrong here. None of these people made the joke make sense. I tried narrowing the search and still found nothing. Undeterred, I opened the Tubi tab, pressed the left arrow key a couple of times, and started the scene over. This time, I turned on subtitles, just in case I spelled the name wrong. Boy, did I ever. It wasn’t ‘Gene Dixon’. It was ‘Jeane Dixon’. I didn’t even get the gender right. What a farthead.

So back to Google I went. Lo and behold, there she was. Jeane Dixon, American astrologer and psychic. A total hack fraud. Wikipedia tells me she predicted the Kennedy assassination. I would have stopped that one if I were her. Thanks for nothing, Jeane.

Anyway. One of the car tires pops, necessitating a stop. By the time the group gets back on the road, the sun is starting to go down. Looks like they’ll have to camp for the night. Nice knowing ya, ladies and gents. Even Jeane Dixon could see where this is going.

Thankfully, the group comes across an abandoned mansion in the middle of nowhere. Right from the get-go, this place doesn’t seem right. A wrecked and damaged car sits atop a stone structure in the yard, almost like a shrine. Inside the car are photographs of a beautiful woman. Inside, the group finds those same pictures lining the walls. Well, all but one wall anyway. That wall has a crack in the plaster that seems to grow longer every minute. I’m sure there are no dead bodies encased in that one. Helen gets the big time heebie-jeebies and refuses to stay inside the mansion overnight.

Helen tells her friends that the house is evil, prompting fat guy jokester Peter to say to her, “Hey, maybe you’ll spit up pea soup, and your head’ll spin around”, which makes no sense. The house is evil, not Helen. So wouldn’t the house spit up pea soup? Did Peter actually see THE EXORCIST? Does he think Father Merrin projectile vomits and fucks himself with a crucifix? Also, the actor playing Rod has Topher Grace's face. It’s very distracting, like someone transplanted Topher Grace’s face onto the actor’s body, but his head is the wrong shape, so it’s a bit stretched in weird directions.

I’m sorry, kids, I’m getting a little bored here, so my mind is wandering. It’s been almost 35 minutes, and the only thing I’ve learned from this movie is how to check a tire’s condition with a penny and that Jeane Dixon probably could have prevented the Vietnam War.

Anyway, Helen decides to leave and ends up having her throat cut by an unseen assailant in the woods. The group explores the basement and finds two coffins. One is marked ‘Amanda,’ and the other reads ‘Alfred’. Someone honks the horn of the wrecked car. When they rush outside, they find no one inside. Maybe it was Helen playing a prank, they think. Peter is wearing a Godzilla t-shirt, which almost offsets his abrasive personality. Jack and Rod begin acting antagonistically towards each other for no real reason. There’s a collection of human scalps in the closet and a picture book of dead bikers upstairs. If it feels like I’m just rambling off a list of random things, don’t blame me. I didn’t write this movie. I’m just giving you a play-by-play recap.

I will say, there is a surprising amount of cocks and balls in this movie, way more than I expected. Our only real female nudity comes when Tony passes out in an upstairs bedroom. He dreams that the woman from the photographs enters his room, strips bare, and bones him. He snaps out of it at the sound of the horn honking again. This time, when he goes and checks, he finds Helen’s corpse inside the car.

We are now 57 minutes into this 86-minute movie. From this moment forward, it is full steam ahead. People start dropping like flies until only a single protagonist is left standing. Considering this is a slasher film, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention that our third-act survivor is a final girl. Who that final girl actually is blew my fucking mind the first time I watched DEADLY MANOR. Our third-act protagonist turns out to be the one character whose personality was an utter mystery to me. She is the least used, least explored character of the bunch, the one person you could have removed from the film entirely and not changed a damn thing. It’s a bold choice in a movie devoid of bold choices.

The film is lopsided, with everything fun and interesting crammed into the final 35 minutes. When it finally gets rolling, it’s a big ball of laughs and stabbings. A histrionic villain performance, people tearlessly crying over their dead friends, juicy throat cuttings and gooey stabbings, a dollop of nighttime atmosphere, a driving and overwrought score… All of that shit is great slasher fun, but it comes at the cost of two acts where nothing really happens.

We get a lukewarm love triangle between Rod, Susan, and Jack, but it’s confined to two scenes. Jack’s convict status is basically a rationalization for what would otherwise be a deus ex machina finale. Helen’s disappearance is forgotten faster than you can spell L’AVVENTURA. The middle of the movie is spent with our flavorless characters, watching them sleep or wander through largely empty rooms. Had this all been paced better, it would have been engaging.

Still, the film has an easygoing Scooby-Doo vibe that makes for a good second-screen feature. You can easily dip in and out of it before giving it your full attention during the third-act bloodbath. And that third-act absolutely makes watching the whole movie worth it. It’s bonkers and stupid in all the right ways. Start the film at the 57-minute mark and have a blast.