Deadly Manor



Three couples are traveling through the countryside searching for a particular lake that they plan to camp at. On the way there they pick up a mysterious hitchhiker who claims to be familiar with the area. But whether he is or not ends up being irrelevant, as a flat tire delays their progress significantly enough for them to not be able to make it to the lake before nightfall. Deciding it’s unwise to drive around blindly in the dark, the group goes down a nearby road with the intention of finding somewhere to camp the night and continue on the next day. But instead of a clearing they stumble upon an old, dilapidated house. Figuring it’ll just be easier to stay there overnight rather than spending time setting up camp or sleeping in the car, the group goes inside and gets comfy. But of course, the rundown old house is not quite as abandoned as it seems, which the group quickly finds out as their numbers start to dwindle one by one.



Oof… Uh… Yeah. You know what, I think this is the universe’s way of telling me that I shouldn’t have been so hard on ole Full Moon all the time, cause things could be a lot worse. Case in point, this movie, a Spanish-American co-production which just so happens to be the last slasher by director José Ramón Larraz, the same guy who directed Vampyres, a movie that I watched just a couple short weeks ago. And I guess I shouldn’t have been so hard on that movie either, cause while it still has it’s problems and isn’t something I’m particularly fond of, it was basically a Shakespearean piece of art compared to Deadly Manor, which just may be one of the saddest slasher’s I’ve seen in quite a while.



Problem #1: The movie is just plain DULL.

It starts off okay by setting up the story, but the bulk of the film just draaaaags. You don’t get to the first kill until after a good 20-minutes which… That’s fine, I can live with that. But then nothing happens for… Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. I mean, things do happen, but it mostly involves a lot of wandering, sleeping, and people staring at a bunch of creepy pictures of this one lady’s head-shots that litter the walls. And I’m even including four deaths during this period of nothingness, because these are perhaps some of the most uninspired slasher killings I’ve seen. The most exciting one involves someone getting their throat cut, but it happens so fast that even the victim doesn’t realize it happened at first. They just stare in stunned silence and then stumble around for a couple seconds before silently collapsing into a pile of hay. Everyone else just ends up getting stabbed, either just off screen or at an annoying angle so that you can barely tell what’s happening. So the movie took the kills, the one fun part about most slashers, and turned the whole process into something as dry as possible. Woo hoo. There’s barely even any blood in them. Which I actually find kinda shocking, because even with all my problems with Vampyres, one of the good things about it was that at least the deaths were bloody and frenzied. Here they just feel like an afterthought. Like the movie is just going through the motions so it can move on to the next scene. The most action the movie has during that whole middle section is some guy’s wet dream, because I guess even after 16 years director Larraz knew where his real priorities were.


_{At least they aren’t tongue lashing each other this time.}

Problem #2: The Script/Story.

Look, I’ll be the first one to tell you that I really like weird horror movies. In fact, I love them. The weirder, the better. Gimme gimme. But the train of logic in this one is just annoyingly hard to swallow, even for my robust suspension of disbelief muscles. I mean, I know that people in horror movies are notoriously dumb, but these people… DEAR GOD. You ever know someone who has horrible taste in romantic partners, to the point where they will ignore every possible red flag no matter how obvious or compelling? Got that person in your mind? Good. Now imagine a group of seven of those people and that every flag is a clear, observable threat to their safety, and yet they ALL ignore them, even after acknowledging the flags and going “oh, that can’t be good.” Because THAT is this movie. And yes, they really are that bad. Creepy burnt car that’s clearly some sort of altar in the front yard? Ignored.


_{Yeah, that’s not concerning at all…}

One of the characters saying they saw someone inside the house? Gaslit, and ignored. The house is locked? Ignore that technicality and just break down the door. Coffins in the basement? Ignored. Innumerable glamor shots of one particular woman lining the walls? Ignored, and in some cases ogled. Found a newspaper from the day before? Ignored and used as kindling. Closet filled with human scalps?!?….


_{WHY ARE ANY OF YOU STILL HERE?!?}

Wait for it…. Yes! Ignored! One of them even tries to brush it aside as someone’s macabre collection! (So I guess that means that at least one of them finally acknowledged that they were in someone’s house?) And again, they acknowledge all of these things as being concerning, but at no point do any of them (beside one) seem to find them concerning enough to actually fucking leave. In fact, they’re so nonchalant about this crap that they all decide to camp out in the living room and sleep right outside the Scalp Closet. The fucking SCALP CLOSET! These fools don’t get truly concerned until they finally realize that two of their group have suddenly gone “missing”. Which begs the question, WTF IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE!?! I would have been out of that death trap hours ago. Cause there is NO WAY I would be staying in a falling down building with coffins in the basement. Nah uh. No way. Not happening. But do these people seem to care? No! Anytime someone raises a valid concern about any of these findings the others talk them out of it and then everyone shrugs it off, as if coffin basements and Scalp Closets are just normal, everyday things. I don’t think I’ve been so annoyed by a group’s such blatant lack of self preservational skills in my entire life.


_{The house still has electricity! You’re in someone’s house! LEAVE, DAMN IT!}

And that just involves the characters. If you’re hoping that the rest of the film’s story makes any sense you are sorely mistaken. I really should have been tipped off by the things to come when everyone was still in the car and the one guy who had supposedly visited the lake they were traveling to before didn’t actually know where the lake was. So he basically got everyone to go on a road trip with him without having the foggiest idea where they were going. Which might have worked for the story if they had gotten lost, but that ‘s not what happened. It just got late and they made a pitstop. So the whole “I don’t actually know how to get to the place we’re going” scene turns out to be absolutely pointless. Though it does essentially sum up the thought process for this movie, in that it seems to have been solely constructed using various horror tropes and ideas, without any thought of whether or not those ideas would pay off in the end. For instance, there’s a focus throughout the film involving a wall in the house with a growing crack in it. And then at the end – SPOILERS!! – the wall cracks open and a bunch of bodies pour out of the wall. Yet at no point are we ever told who these bodies are or how/why they were shoved in the wall. I think they just included it because they thought it would make a neat visual. But in reality – END SPOILERS!! –  it added nothing.



In the end, I think the only thing Deadly Manor really has going for it is that it has an excellent sense of atmosphere. The house is creepy and the visuals are nice and it’s lit well enough, but… Eh, that’s about it. Well… Okay, I’ll also contend that the ending and the killer’s motivations are delightfully bizarre and offbeat, but that one interesting aspect comes so late in the game that after sitting through all the tropes, cliches and slow pacing it hardly feels worth it, even if it does contain one of the few instances in a horror movie where the police are actually competent at their jobs (you love to see it.) But at the same time the film is also quite competently made, so I can’t just say it sucks. It doesn’t. It’s just PAINFULLY mediocre. So if you’re just in it for the visuals and need something easy to put on in the background, or you just desperately need to watch every slasher EVER, then I guess this will work. But if you’re looking for something a little more unique, or scary, or at least a movie whose characters sport more than 5 total brain cells between them, then you can skip this.

Deadly Manor is available on a variety of streaming services.

Deadly Manor is also available on DVD and Bluray.

Helpful Links: