DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE (1976)
Dir: E. W. Swackhamer

Robert Wagner and Kate Jackson portray a husband and wife team researching and writing a book based on legendary screen goddess Lorna Love. In order to soak up atmosphere and lend an authentic ambiance to their work, the pair shack up in Love's former Hollywood Hills estate, untouched since her untimely death years ago and redolent of former evil in residence. In the interest of narrative exigency, they quickly discover a pursed lip housekeeper, various objects left over from occult ceremonies, a ghostly figure in white flitting about the fountain area and a stuffed black cat. A murder and an attempt on Jackson's life follows, along with a string of bad weather, and soon the film is moving towards its overblown finale.

Silly, bland and tame even by television standards, Death at Love House has few recommending qualities. Among a paltry handfull are the cameos of veteran actors, contemporaries of the fictional Love character: John Carradine in a rain-soaked duster bearing tidings of doom; Dorothy Lamour as a bitter ex-rival of Love's, now hawking coffee on television commercials (uncomfortably prescient almost); and Joan Blondell's quirky portrait of the “ultimate fan”. Sylvia Syndey steals the show as the ominous housekeeper, and Jackson brings her usual dignity and quiet classiness to the hokiest of scenarios. A couple of minor twists in the final moments of the story are effective, but barely enough to justify the preceding 70 minutes.

Love House has neither the ability or intention to aspire to a classic Hollywood Gothic such as Sunset Boulevard or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, yet it samples freely from both without absorbing any of those films' wry details. The 70s vogue for the 1920s and 30s (Paper Moon, The Great Gatsby, The Sting, Chinatown) inspired the script, but no effort was made to evoke the time periods; the “films” of Lorna Love, screened in the Spanish Colonial-style mansion of the dead star by an obsessive Wagner are amateurish and empty. A few sepia-tinted “reincarnation” scenes involving Love and Wagner could be outtakes from The Love Boat left too long in the developer.