Burnt Offerings

I had never seen Burnt Offerings before , but it showed up on TCM this past October as part of the horror movie themes, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it and do a post on it here. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The Rolfs are a family led by father Ben (Oliver Reed), who has a wife Marian (Karen Black), and 12-year-old son David (Lee Montgomery). They're looking for a place to spend the summer on vacation, in part so that Ben can work on whatever writing it is that he needs to do. Ben and Marian think they've found just the place, the old Allardyce mansion. They meet with two of the representatives of the family, sister Roz (Eileen Heckart) and wheelchair-bound brother Arnold (Burgess Meredith). The two seem slightly dodgy and creepy, especially when they're talking about their elderly mother who lives in a room on the top floor and rarely leaves, having her food brought up to her twice a day.

This ought to be a big warning to the Rolfs, but they decide to take the house for the summer since the Allardyces are offering it for the extremely good price of $900 for the whole summer, which wasn't much for such a place even in the 1970s. The Rolfs bring Ben's aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) along with them, ready to enjoy a summer once they get the house in order, as it's a bit run down from Roz and Arnold's inability to deal with the upkeep.

More red flags show up vrey early when they get to the house and find that Roz and Arnold have left without leaving any way to contact them, and announcing that they've left Mom behind for the Rolfs to take care of. That seems like a huge breach of contract to me, and I would have thought about getting in touch with somebody to deal with that, but no, the Rolfs can't be bothered to do that, with Dad trying to get the pool ready for swimming and Mom taking care of the inside of the house.

And then Marian goes up and knocks on the elderly Mrs. Allardyce's door -- and gets no answer. My immediate thought would be that there might be something seriously wrong with Mrs. Allardyce, and I'd open the door to check up on her. God forbid she suffered a heart attack or something considering her kids' having neglected her. But Marian doesn't do any of that.

Meanwhile, creepy things start happening, especially when Ben and David both go swimming and Dad is much too hard on his son when they're "roughhousing", with Dad nearly drowning his son. This being a horror movie, it's a sign that there's something clearly wrong and that there's more to come. To be fair, that particular incident isn't something that the Rolfs themselves ought to notice, but for an outside observer watching the movie, it's just the first of many. Ben also starts having dreams from when he was a kid and his father died, with the driver of the hearse being super creepy, reminiscent of the "room for one more" story in Dead of Night.

It goes on like this, with things getting more serious when Aunt Elizabeth has some sort of medical issue that ultimately kills her. Surely this is going to get the rest of the Rolfs to break off their summer vacation, go home to bury Elizabeth, and stay home! Who on earth would want to stay in a creepy rental mansion after that?

Even more than a lot of other horror movies, Burnt Offerings is one that to me really seemed to rely on the characters making profoundly stupid decisions that nobody in real life would make. I know that suspension of disbelief to some extent is a thing when watching the movies, but Burnt Offerings required a bit too much suspension of disbelief for me. It didn't help that the ending is pretty darn easy to see coming. The other big problem that the movie has is that it runs pretty darn slowly. It's only a shade under two hours, but felt like it could have been better told in a good 20 minutes less.

Burnt Offerings is a movie that would do well paired in a horror double-feature on TCM next October with something like House.