Don't Go in the House (1980)
Here is a sleazy little number that positions itself as a horror movie, but it's really nothing more than a display of misogynistic cruelty. Don't Go in the House is worthless junk, nothing more.
In 1980, Don't Go in the House came out along with both Maniac and Don't Answer the Phone to blight the genre of the horror movie. Each one was just scene after scene of a vile murderer chasing and torturing women. I'm not one to jump on this particular soapbox very often, but when I do, it's usually pretty justified. The most telling thing of all is that, of these three movies, Don't Go in the House is probably the 'best', if that says anything.
Our killer here is played by Dan Grimaldi. He suffers from some serious childhood traumas and mother issues (don't they all?). You see, whenever he was caught masturbating, Mommy would punish him by lighting the gas stove and holding his arms over the scalding hot burners. Now, as an adult, he is obsessed with punishing all of womankind; his method of choice? Burning.
So, Grimaldi outfits the basement of his house with fireproof, metallic floors and walls and attaches hooks and chains to the ceiling. Now we get lovely scenes of Grimaldi tricking various women into his house, and while they are stripped naked and chained and handcuffed, he splashes them with gasoline and roasts them alive. It's difficult not to feel revulsion at these drawn out scenes of the women pleading for their lives and being barbecued. After the deed is done, he takes their blackened, crispy corpses, puts them in dresses and keeps them in his mother's old bedroom. All of this plods along in predictable fashion as Grimaldi gets more and more squirrelly and becomes more obvious in his psychosis, even setting his blind date aflame at the local disco. And blah blah blah.
Don't Go in the House is just depressing excrement of the lowest order. There are those who would lump movies like this (and Maniac, Don't Answer the Phone and I Spit On Your Grave) with the slasher films of the same era (Friday the 13th, The Burning, etc.), but true horror fans know there is a world of difference between them.