1968, USA
Setting the tone with its campy Mad Monster Party-style credit sequence, exploitation director Jack Hill’s breakout film launches into psychiatric exposition that details ‘The Merrye Syndrome’ – so-called for its prevalence among the members of a single inbred family, and signified by a developmental regression that sets in at one’s tenth year.
“It is believed that eventually the victim of the Merrye Syndrome may even regress beyond the pre-natal level, reverting to a pre-human condition of savagery and cannibalism”, reads the narrator, who will also play a part in the story to unfold.
With this mock square-up, we jump headfirst into 80 minutes of gleefully maniacal behaviour courtesy of the latest descendents of the Merrye family – siblings Elizabeth Merrye (Beverly Washburn), Virginia Merrye (Jill Banner) and the completely infantile Ralph Merrye (Sid Haig) – along with their put-upon caretaker Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) who attempts to keep them under control after their father’s death.
They live together in a large dilapidated house, which allows for several ‘Old Dark House’ tropes to play out – from goofy humour, creaking floors and trap doors to the cowardly black characters typical of the genre.
Virginia’s favourite game is ‘Spider’ – wherein she ensnares unwanted visitors in her web and carves them up with butcher’s knives – and when distant family members arrive to make a claim on their father’s estate and assert legal guardianship over them, the other kids want in on the fun.
With their guests spending the night, the increasingly dishevelled Merrye sisters slink around the house being sexually as well as homicidally predatory, their repressed distant aunt Emily (’50s starlet Carol Ohmart of House on Haunted Hill) giving an unwitting eyeful to the imbecilic Ralph before succumbing to the animalistic teens.
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