5. Don't Go In The House (1979)
Another cheapo horror film that was labelled a Video Nasty, Don't Go in the House is a very effective little chiller and makes the most of its budget. Donny is a disturbed man whose mother used to abuse and torture him with fires and flames. As a consequence of this he has grown to be a man obsessed with fire and human combustion. A workmate goes up in flames after an accident and Johnny just stands there transfixed. When he goes home, his mother is dead. Now that he has no revenge figure in his life, Donny decides to take his spite out on any woman he meets who in any way resembles his mother. He will do this by burning them alive in a special room he has constructed. In the following days, Donny burns three women he happens to meet in his incinerator room with a flame thrower. He also burns his mother's corpse and he sets his victims around a table - as if it were a sick tea party they are attending. Hearing all sorts of crazy stuff in his head, Donny trots off to Chapel and tells the priest about his mother's abuse and his obsession with fire. The priest just tells him to get over it. In an attempt to gain some normality, Donny goes with his friend Bobby to a disco on a double date but this proves awkward and disastrous. Running out of the disco, Donny meets two drunk girls who end up at his flat. Both Bobby and the Priest happen to meet on their way to Donny's. They bust open the door and save the girls. Donny is so far gone, he hallucinates that the corpses in his mother's bedroom are alive. He fires the flame thrower at them and gets burnt alive as the whole house goes up in flames. Don't Go In the House might have a cheesy 'Don't' title that was all the rage back in the 1970s, and it may also come from a low budget background, but it is a little gem of a film that really gets inside your skin. It is difficult to know what sort of an opinion to make of Donny - okay, he murders people horribly, but he himself was subjected to decades of mind warping cruelty by his mother. He is no slick serial killer like Michael or Jason, he is psychologically wounded and desperate to be free from his afflictions. The film is mainly a psychological portrait of Donny and not some brain dead psycho freak chopping people up for no reason. It has a story to tell and despite its low budget, it tells it eloquently.