The Legend of Hell House

The Legend of Hell House (1973): starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Gayle Hunnicutt
An old man puts a pair of psychics along with a skeptical scientist and his wife in a haunted house in order to prove that there is an afterlife, or to cleanse the house of evil spirits or something. The house in question is "Hell House", a place where thousands of murders have occurred as well as countless acts of bestiality and "vampirism", among other horrors. The film attempts to employ the same techniques used in 1963's "The Haunting" (The Haunting used atmosphere to generate a fear of the unknown), but unlike that film, Hell House fails to generate any suspense. It does, however generate a few laughs, especially when a possessed black cat attacks a woman, leaping at her throat repeatedly, and she slaps an obviously stuffed cat to the floor. Roddy McDowall commits to some serious over-acting in his role as a psychic who's previous experiences in the house have left him mentally unbalanced. The house itself isn't much of a terror: some doors slam shut, some winds kick up and blow things over, and one of the psychics speaks in a funny possessed voice before she's attacked by the scary house cat. The director tries some experimental camera angles, but far from creating terror, these camera angles seem to make the movie even less scary. At one point, I wanted to shut the movie off, not out of fear, but out of sheer boredom. The challenge of Hell House is making it all the way through the picture.
*1/2 out of *****