Yes, DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE seems to be another lurid cinematic adaptation of a real-life serial killer's exploits. The first time I saw this film I said to myself "Now where have I heard about someone burning fetching young ladies to death in an asbestos insulated room before?" and the answer is Herman Mudgett, aka H.H. Holmes, Chicago's twisted "Torture Doctor" who murdered anywhere between 20 and 200 people in a self-designed townhouse on 63rd Street during the 1890s. Mudgett built a maze of false corridors, secret passageways, trap doors, sound proof and air proof killing rooms and dug vats for quicklime acid baths & a crematorium incinerator in the basement of his 3 story castle of horrors, complete with fake battlements and windows covered with sheets of steel. The most famous of which was an asbestos lined room with gas jets where he would confine victims and watch them being burnt to cinders for kicks.

It is perhaps from those basic elements that the brain trust responsible for DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE found their inspiration for a story about a steel mill worker who goes on a killing spree after his mother -- who cruelly abused him as a child -- drops dead in her sitting chair. Character actor Dan Grimaldi is very well cast as Donny Koehler, a mommy obsessed loser and budding psychopath still bearing the scars of his childhood trauma where mom attempted to "burn the evil out" of his soul by holding his bare arms over a lit gas stove, which of course created a Freudian fascination with fire, his relationship with women, his mistrust of authority figures and religion. It doesn't quite answer the question of how he became interested in disco music but what the hell, that was the fad of the time. These days he'd be obsessed with Britney Spears maybe, which IMHO would make for an even more frightening portrait of insanity.

Several things about this movie actually click and make it a rewarding ride for fans of 1980s era slasher horror, the first being the setting. This is one of the most bleak and dismal looking horror movies ever, set on Long Island during a cold, inhospitable looking February that is actually quite unique: Most slasher movies are set during the warmer months of the year to afford the cast to walk around half naked in the great outdoors. By contrast this film is set within dank, claustrophobic interiors, specifically the wonderfully creepy, empty and rapidly dilapidating house that Donny grew up in, which is photographed from an interesting vantage point to make it look all the more isolated from the rest of the world. There are no neighbors to overhear the screams of anguish from Donny's victims, who's complete lack of hope for rescue is probably more disturbing than their on screen fates.

Much ado is rightfully made about Donny's first murder of a full-breasted young florist he tricks into coming home with him after wrapping up a get well bouquet for his putrefying dead mother. She is knocked unconscious, stripped nude, hung by her wrists, doused with gasoline and lit on fire. The sequence is convincingly staged but again what struck me about the murder wasn't how graphic it was so much as that she has utterly no hope of salvation and is merely present in the story as someone to suffer horribly for the benefit of the camera. Then there is the scene in the men's shop where Donny is outfitted for a night on the town in a disco ensemble suit that would have made John Travolta envious. Others have questioned it's relevance to the story and my thought is that it depicts just how isolated Donny is from the world around him. And reflects the filmmakers' disdain for the whole disco era subculture.

Aside from the young florist no characters in this story are sympathetic, there are no good guys and even the local minister ends up a charred reminder of how the community failed Donny by turning a blind eye to his mother's cruelty. Next time you are waiting in line at the grocery store and some pathetic loser starts screaming at their misbehaving kid tell them to knock it off lest the young urchin someday grow up to buy an asbestos suit and flamethrower. Psychopathic mommy obsessed losers are a dime a dozen and you might just end up saving the life of a hot young florist with pert nipples. We need all of them we can get.

6/10

Withdrawn troubled loner Donald Kohler (a superbly intense, nuanced, and convincing performance by Dan Grimaldi, who went on to become a regular on "The Sopranos") was horribly abused as a kid by his mean and overbearing mother. After mommy dies Donny goes off the deep end and succumbs to the sinister whispery voices in his head. He embarks on a vicious misogynistic killing spree in which he brings assorted lovely young ladies to his forbidding rundown house and burns them alive. He keeps the charred corpses in the den so he can yell at them. Director Joseph Ellison does an expert job of creating and maintaining a grim, harsh, and unsparingly unpleasant tone that's both potent and unnerving in comparable measure. This movie reaches its startling apex when Donny nonchalantly torches a bound and naked lady with a flamethrower while clad in an asbestos suit. Another amazing highlight happens when Donny sets a woman's hair on fire at a groovy disco club. In a nice nihilistic touch Donny's sole jerky slimeball friend Bobby Tuttle (a perfectly obnoxious portrayal by Robert Osth) winds up being the hero of the picture. In addition, this flick deserves bonus points for bumping off an ineffectual wannabe helpful priest and for being firmly grounded in a plausibly drab blue collar reality. Oliver Wood's stark, grainy cinematography and Richard Einhorn's shivery'n'shuddery score further enhance the overall genuinely creepy, sleazy and unsettling nightmarish mood. Bleak central point: Serial killers are toxically messed-up products of severe childhood mistreatment. A nice'n'nasty nugget.

A classic example of an exploitation film of the late 1970s, this movies manages to rise above the standard, clichéd roots and become an interesting look at the life of a schizophrenic murderer. The film's main advantage is that it portrays Donny as a believable and sympathetic character, who is simply suffering from delusions and a mental illness. He is not in control of his actions, and it is his mother who is really to blame for the murders that take place. The film also manages to put in a moral line about child abuse. The main actor never disappoints in his role, convincing throughout.

However, your average viewer would probably be put off by the sickening scenes of naked women being burnt alive. They're not especially explicit, but even worse are the scenes of Donny interacting with the burnt corpses which really are disturbing. The film has very few supernatural moments, although there is a genuinely chilling climax borrowed from MANIAC. Although the film's trappings have dated in the subsequent decades - particularly in that cheesy disco scene - it hasn't lost its power to shock, and is one of the most interesting of all the low-budget PSYCHO derivatives.