DVD Review: DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE (Arrowdrome)

Having a rotten mother will fuck you up.

Twenty years after Mrs. Bates' incessant badgering and criticizing of a weak willed Norman turned him into a psychotic terror, Joseph Ellison's Don't Go in the House unleashed another unhinged mama's boy in Disco Donny. Arrow Video's budget label, Arrowdrome, brings this nasty little underseen gem to UK DVD uncut for the first time. A blatant riff on Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's Psycho (itself inspired by the gruesome real-life story of Ed Gein), Don't Go in the House exceeds it's predecessor in terms of blood and gore by a country mile, while throwing in bits and pieces of other more contemporary films like Saturday Night Fever. Don't Go in the House is definitely one that every slasher fan should see. It probably won't change anyone's world, but it is among the earliest examples of the genre before it turned into self-parody, and for that alone is worth checking out.

Donny Kohler is a hardworking man who has a difficult time making friends. He lives in a big, mostly empty house with his overbearing mother. He hates her, but she keeps him pretty well in check, even though she can barely move and, within the first fifteen minutes of the film, she's dead. Her death flips the "crazy" switch in Donny's head and before long he's luring nubile young women back to his newly christened bachelor pad for some hot times, literally.

You see, whenever Donny had an impure thought, good old mom would hold his arms over the gas flames of his stove, leaving them grotesquely scarred. These flames have stayed with Donny and he decides that the fire is the only way to cleanse the world of evil, and so in the ever so eloquent words of Don't Go in the House's tagline: