Shriek Show / Anamorphic Widescreen (1.85:1) / Color / 1 disc / 82 minutes

DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE (1980) tries to be more than just a movie about a serial killer. It’s a commentary on loss, isolation and the cycle of abuse … an homage to … awe, the heck with it. Here’s why you watch this schlock: To see a voluptuous gal get tied up, doused with gasoline and torched to death by a sexually confused mamma’s boy armed with a homemade flame-thrower.

That infamous nude fire death is DON’T’s centerpiece. It’s like Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, but without any of that film’s style or subtleties. There are other comparisons too — chiefly our leading man’s love-hate obsession with his mother, who he “preserves” by burning her until she’s a dried-up cracklin’ of leathery flesh. We even get PSYCHO’s iconic “Arbogast” stairway death sequence, recreated in DON’T with a meddling priest and our hero armed with his trusty flame gun.

A boyish Dan Grimaldi (”The Sopranos,” CROOKLYN) stars as Donald Kohler, a 20-something-year-old dope who works in an incineration plant somewhere in a sparsely populated town on the northeastern seaboard. By night he tends to his aging mother, who repeatedly abused him as a child by trying to “burn out” the evil inside him that presumably, led to his father leaving the both of them.

One evening Donald arrives home to discover his mother has died in her sleep. The voices in his head tell him everything is OK; he’s the man of the house now. He celebrates his newfound freedom by jumping on furniture, smoking cigarettes (and stubbing them out on his mother’s porcelain figurines), and playing disco music at a thunderous volume. He works long into the night, tacking sheet metal onto the walls in a spare room, creating a spacious incineration chamber. The last stop is the pawnshop, where he skips over knives and guns and goes for the asbestos suit and helmet on display. Fire it up — ready to go!

Donald’s first victim is the leggy neighborhood florist Kathy (Johanna Brushay), who he lures into his country gothic home under the pretense of meeting his mother. She’s incapacitated and wakes up dangling nude from a hook in the incineration room. Donald enters looking like a spaceman from perdition in his fireproof suit. Old-school torture porn ensues, ending with Kathy engulfed in flames, twitching and burned to a crisp.

Donald continues this cycle of depravity until he has three charred bodies posed upstairs in a bedroom, all dressed in his mother’s clothes. The voices in his head are soon joined by the voices of the murdered. Donald spends his days bitch-slapping corpses and shouting at them, “Don’t you dare laugh at me … I won’t stand impudence from any of you! Stop trying to scare me all the time!”

Afraid to be home alone because his scorched mother keeps showing up in hallways and on stairway landings, Donald calls a work buddy, who invites him for a night of disco dancing. After a lengthy and uncomfortable scene in a clothing store in which Donald selects his evening wear, it’s off to the local hotspot where he struggles to stave off the advances of a buxom woman in red. She wants to dance, he doesn’t. He panics, grabs a candle and lights her hair on fire like Michael Jackson in a Pepsi commercial.

The film’s final act abandons pure psychological horror for a touch of the Grand Guignol. It’s fairly chuckle inducing, but unfortunately it doesn’t end cleanly, preferring to drift off into a preachy discourse on child abuse.

As far as low-budget horror goes, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE offers a good bit of bang for the buck. As we’ve seen in films such as THE CAR, BLOOD SHACK and WARLOCK MOON, a community devoid of paid extras and needless character actors often creates a strangely disturbing atmosphere of detachment and isolation. Scenes of the small anonymous town are often juxtaposed with sweeping frozen landscapes with only Donald in frame.

Director/writer Joseph Ellison (He has one other film to his credit, 1986’s JOEY) wisely selected Donald’s home to convey his confusion and inner conflict. It’s an odd three-story rambling structure that we never get a clear exterior view of. Its interior is a study in extremes — sumptuous furniture and macabre statues stand alongside decrepit peeling wallpaper and chipped drywall. Camera angles are often dutch, combined with long shadows and directional lighting, hinting at German expressionism and the disorientation in Donald’s mind.

Similarly, the use of color is Argento-esque. Vermilion reds pop against muted browns and grays, while Egyptian blues suggest a violent counterpoint. Most of Donald’s victims wear red. His first victim not only wears the color, but her hair is auburn as well. His mother is wearing bright red when she is discovered dead; the disco scene, rife with drug use and sex, is bathed in red light as if to portray a den of infernal hedonism. Blue appears during scenes of torment; in particular, Donald’s mother is awash in cerulean window light as she burns his hands over a stove in a flashback.

Grimaldi portrays Donald’s character as a shy, confused child. He’s painfully awkward around people, throws tantrums and whines. When he sleeps, it’s in a baby’s fetal position. He doesn’t fully understand his ability to torture and kill and is unable to show compassion. Even as a friendly co-worker nearly burns to death during a job site accident, he can only stand by and watch with doe-eyed fascination. He’s confused sexually as well. He wields his flame-thrower like a phallus; the eventual fiery death is the proverbial money shot.

Donald’s misery is often accompanied by a spare, six-note circular motif on glockenspiel that is both haunting and comforting, not unlike a music box.

Shriek Show has put together a decent presentation. The print exhibits the usual atmospheric funk and scratches, but looks remarkably clear and vibrant for a movie of this vintage. Audio is fairly exceptional as well. Bonus features include the film’s original trailers, an interview and an insightful commentary track featuring Grimaldi, and a handful of trailers for other Shriek Show releases.

The most interesting extra feature takes us “behind the letterbox” and reveals to us what was lurking on the original film before it was masked off for widescreen. The film’s two key scenes, the disco and the initial burning murder, are presented unmatted. In the latter scene we are afforded some closer full-frontal nudity of the first victim that was lost during the original widescreen crop.

Overall DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE is derivative, predictable fare, but it still entertains with a modicum of sleaze and suspense. As I’ve said before, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. I give it three stars.

Check out a trailer for this film below: