Hammer House of Horror: The House That Bled To Death (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Episode # 5. Pretty cool title, eh? Could have made a good sequel to ‘The House That Dripped Blood’ in an alternate world. But anyway, yes - this is ‘the haunted house one’, much as you’d expect.

Director Tom Clegg’s sparse feature credits however include such hard-boiled items as ‘Sweeney 2’ (1978) and ‘McVicar’ (1980), so it’s perhaps not surprising that, in keeping with all preceding episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, he and writer David Lloyd entirely forgo gothic/period atmos here, instead telling the quotidian tale of a young family who have the misfortune to move into a pebble-dashed suburban semi previously occupied by an old codger who cut up his missus with a pair of Gurkha knives, which, after being eerily rediscovered by the new occupants, remain ominously nailed up on the kitchen wall.

When it came to this episode, I confess I mainly found myself enthralled by the ambient details and textures of lower middle class British life circa 1980 which fill almost every second of screen time. This is more-or-less where I came from, but my memories are sketchy, so I couldn’t help just drinking it all in, thinking about the life lived by my parents, and their neighbours and friends, around the time of my birth.

Of course, unlike husband/father Nicholas Ball here, my old man didn’t look and act like an attempt to genetically cross-breed Mel Gibson and David Hemmings; there’s something fishy about that guy right from the start I thought, although the double denim outfit he wears to the first day of his gig as a hospital porter is admittedly pretty spectacular.

(And just imagine, incidentally, a world in which it was a reasonable expectation for a bloke who works as a porter to have not only managed to buy his own family home, but to support his wife, who can comfortably stay home caring for the kid and doing the shopping. Outdated patriarchal assumptions aside, and bearing in mind that we probably shouldn’t regard an episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ as a barometer of social realism, it gives you an insight into how sorely the lot of the common (wo)man has declined over the years, doesn't it?)

BUT ANYWAY. Horror-wise, most of this episode is pretty excruciating and/or boring to be honest, as the family’s daughter is traumatised by the highly suspicious death of her beloved cat (who seems to have eviscerated himself on a broken window), and as her parents meanwhile develop a creepily intimate passive/aggressive relationship with their across-the-road neighbours (TV stalwarts Pat Maynard and Brian Croucher - the latter so shifty and pervy he makes Ball seem like a paragon of trust in comparison).

But, it’s difficult to resist the show-stopping chaos of the central children's party drenched in blood set-piece, and the story’s final act brings forth a splendidly cynical, self-reflexive twist which I really enjoyed (but won’t spoil), closing on a note of vengeful nastiness worthy of a Pete Walker movie.