House of Fear
                                                                                                                        
Director: Roy William Neill
Year: 1945
Rating: 6.0
In the opening credits, the film claims to be based on Doyle's The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips. Well, there are orange pips in the film, but that is about the only resemblance. The short story is about the Ku Klux Klan after revenge in England. The film more closely resembles Christie's And Then There Were None, published in 1939 and adapted into a film in the same year as this, 1945. The setting for this film is in Scotland in a large Gothic styled mansion wonderfully named Drearcliff in which a group of men are murdered one by one.



The group calls itself the Good Comrades Club and consists of seven older single men who have clearly sworn off the opposite sex and only wish to live a quiet life of solitude. Then envelopes begin to arrive with orange pips in them. And that person dies soon afterwards. Clearly, a case for Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Doctor Watson. They take the Flying Scotsman to the Highlands and investigate as the men continue to drop like flies in grisly fashion.  The men had executed a life policy that pretty much ensures murder. The policy is to be split evenly between the surviving members. Of course, as the deaths add up, the number of suspects diminishes.



By this time Universal and director Roy William Neill had Gothic mystery/horror down to a science with its shadowy atmospherics. The shot of the house from a distance might look familiar as it was borrowed from. Voice of Terror and the inside of the mansion was the same set used for Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. The films had budgets less than $200,000 and so you cut back when possible. The mansion even comes with a forbidding housekeeper who delivers the envelopes of death. Watson gets a lot of screen time in this one, blustering about and accusing everyone. At one point, Holmes makes him dig up a coffin some five feet down and Holmes watches and smokes his pipe. Poor Watson. It is a decent little mystery that I expect few people will guess correctly. Rathbone was paid $20,000 and Bruce $12,000.