Director: Herb Freed
Writers: Anne Marisse and Herb Freed
From: Chilling (only 1 remains!)
Watch:archive.org
A murder in a small town sparks paranoia and awakens repressed memories in one young woman.
Our lord and savior, Cameron Mitchell, is here, but not even he can save this movie.
We open with the killer being spotted disposing of his victim in a barn. He gets away, but everyone in town is in a panic now. Ingrid, a woman who lives alone on another farm at the edge of town, is nervous about the attention she’s being paid by Frankie, an asshole who works at the general store, and Bill, a newcomer that’s joined her church choir. She keeps having imagistic flashbacks to something that happened before: we see gates closing, a girl sitting on a man’s lap while her leg is suggestively stroked, and a couple in bed. These get clearer as the movie goes on.
On Ingrid’s way home from choir practice, a drunken Frankie propositions her and drives off in a huff when she turns him down. Meanwhile, Bill is at a bar turning down the advances of a local woman. He leaves (both the bar and the movie-). As Ingrid walks home alone, the killer tries to attack her, but she manages to hit him in the head with a rock and escape. Ingrid’s Uncle Carl (Mitchell with dark hair) tells her to calm down and not call the sheriff, but she calls anyway. The sheriff dismisses her concerns because he’s been getting calls from women all night.
Frankie picks up his girlfriend and she notices an injury on the side of his face. They fight and she leaves. The woman who’d been flirting with Bill at the bar gets in her car and is murdered by the killer. Her body is dumped at Ingrid’s farm. Now the sheriff suspects he was wrong to dismiss her concerns.
As far as the audience is concerned, there are three suspects: Frankie, Bill, and Uncle Carl. Ingrid has increasingly vivid hallucinations (that we don’t realize are hallucinations until the end of the movie) including Frankie breaking into her house to assault her. She goes to church to tell the priest about Frankie, but can’t bring herself to say what happened. Frankie comes in to talk to the priest and, from what Ingrid overhears, it sounds like he’s admitting to the assault. They both leave separately and the killer attacks Ingrid in the graveyard. While she’s in the hospital getting checked out and accusing Frankie of the crime, the priest tells the sheriff that Frankie has gotten the sheriff’s daughter pregnant—that’s what he was telling the priest.
While the sheriff goes to arrest Frankie, the killer is seen trying to murder someone else. The cops chase him down and kill him. It’s Bill (welcome back to the movie). Frankie is released and Ingrid goes home. She knows Frankie is the killer, though, and grabs a shirt that should have his fingerprints on it. When she gets downstairs, she finds Uncle Carl tied to a chair and Frankie threatening her with a pair of scissors. They struggle, Ingrid stabs Frankie in the back, and Uncle Carl says he’ll take care of the body. He tells her not to call the cops because they won’t believe her.
He buries the body and then walks in on her in the shower the same way Frankie had earlier. She flees, goes to the cops, and tells them the entire story. They don’t fully believe her, but go to her house anyway. It’s too dark to find the body and the sheriff spends the night on the couch to continue the search in the morning. They find the grave except it has her goat in it, not Frankie. Frankie’s still alive. When the sheriff goes upstairs to check on Ingrid, he finds her dead from suicide in the tub.
After the funeral, Uncle Carl (Mitchell with gray hair) arrives and gets the whole story from the sheriff. Ingrid had imagined the assault and everything else with Frankie and had even imagined her Uncle’s presence. Uncle Carl reveals that Ingrid’s parents died within a week of each other and that he hadn’t seen her since he’d had her sent to an orphanage. From the flashbacks we’ve had with Ingrid and the more detailed ones with Uncle Carl showing his face, we learn that he’d had an incestuous relationship with his sister, was caught in bed with her by Ingrid on the day of her father’s funeral, and that led to her mother’s suicide.
The sheriff drops Uncle Carl off at the house. He steps into the bathroom where the taps start pouring blood. He looks in the mirror and sees (I think) Ingrid standing in the shower. He turns and approaches her. THE END.
I don’t know what to do with this movie. I’d watched it before in the earlier attempt to see all these flicks and remembered most of it. The key things I remembered were that I didn’t like it because it made Ingrid’s rape accusation a false rape accusation. There were extra layers like her having to “confess” her sin of being a rape victim to the priest and then the priest seemingly hearing Frankie admit to it, but dismissing the admission. That Frankie is admitting something else and the movie is trying to make us misinformed the same way Ingrid is doesn’t help. Instead, it implies that accusing someone of rape is a sign of being unbalanced, not something to take seriously.
That was my impression the first time I watched it. This second time, my position has softened slightly, but only slightly. The sheriff believes Ingrid’s accusation. His doubt at the very end—the doubt that leads to her suicide—stems from having caught the killer in the act and killed him. So he’s confused about what’s going on instead of dismissing her claim. However, his explanation to Uncle Carl at the end doubles down on the movie presenting the perspective of rape accusations as something not to be trusted.
Narratively, the twist that Uncle Carl wasn’t really there and that she imagined Frankie’s assault becomes too much. All the details have to be revealed in an info dump at the end in the squad car. Not only does it kill any energy that may remain at the end of the film, it adds an extra 10-15 minutes. If Frankie had been a second killer, if he and Bill had been working in tandem (or even Bill, Frankie, and Uncle Carl), you’ve got a tight 81-minute feature that ends with a real bang. Instead it putters to its conclusion.
Oh, and the incest and implied child molestation. All of Ingrid’s flashbacks are literally flashes of scenes that are carefully blocked to hide who’s doing what to whom. I understood what they were because I’d seen the movie before, but we have to have the key provided by Uncle Carl at the end to explain all this stuff we’d been seeing throughout the movie. Even then, he’s lying so we don’t know how much really happened and how much was imagined by Ingrid because the movie’s just told us we can’t trust her claims of sexual assault!
The implication from how Mitchell delivers the lines is that he maybe murdered Ingrid’s father, was definitely having an affair with her mother/his sister, and when they got caught by Ingrid, Ingrid’s mother committed suicide. However, while he’s providing voice-over for the flashback, we also have his hand stroking young Ingrid’s leg. So did he molest her? Did the mother find out leading to him murdering her? Because there’s a shot of him coming out of the bath, standing over the mother’s corpse, dripping which seems to contradict the shots of the mother seemingly having committed suicide.
And the ghost he sees in the mirror—is it Ingrid, the mother, or his own imagination? And why’s it called Haunts? There are no ghosts until the end, if that’s even supposed to be a ghost.
Anyway, it’s not good. If it lost about twenty minutes from the end, it’d be a fine Saturday afternoon thriller to stumble across on Retro TV or something. What it actually is isn’t worth watching. It is in the public domain, though. I uploaded a copy to archive.org here almost exactly four and a half years ago. With some creative editing, you might be able to make something better from it.
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