Crew
Director/Screenplay – J. Riffel, Producers – Melisse Lewis & James Riffel, Photography – Mark Petersson, Music – William B. Riffel, Makeup Effects – Ed French. Production Company – October Films.
Cast
Mark Zobian (Ron), Victor Verhaeghe (Bob), Sarah Newhouse (Jamie), Douglas F. Gibson (Mark/Old Lady), John Dayton Cerna (Steve), Naomi Kooker (Linda), Eugene Sautner (Joey), Rob Moretti (S), James Griffith (Ricky), Leighann Belair (1940s Girl)
Plot
A group of friends go to renovate an old house in the countryside. However, once in the house, they find that they are trapped and cannot unlock the doors or break through the windows. An old lady then appears and kills each of them. The dead then return to taunt the living about their impending fates.
This is a film that floats around under multiple titles. It did little business when it came out under the title The Dead Come Home. There seems to have been a desperate attempt to market it under some title that connected with audiences, including a Troma release as The House on Tombstone Hill, which makes it sound like a Western, and Dead Dudes in the House, which tries to make it into a Horror Comedy when it isn’t.
You get the impression that the filmmakers obtained the use of an old farmhouse and conceived and shot the film around it. That said, there are credits for set building (but none for production design) suggesting that some or all of the farmhouse would appear to have been built on sets. Most of the plot has the modern characters imprisoned in the house, unable to get out, and then being killed one by one. It is not clear, beyond the old woman and younger woman we see in the prologue that takes place in 1948, why this is happening.
There is a certain cheesy entertainment value in watching the various deaths, which do rise to a moderate level of gore. The most entertaining of these is when Eugene Sautner is left hanging from an open window by his fingertips and the old lady appears and chops his hands off with a machete only for him to land on the ground and be impaled as the granny throws a pole at him. There are also the occasionally amusing scenes when the murdered reappear, smiling calculatingly while turning to display knives poking out of their backs and the like.
The cast all give fairly negligible performances, barely above the level of the generic teens that turn up in a slasher movie of the era. The one performance that does stand out – and the only actor that has done much of anything elsewhere – is Victor Verhaeghe who gives a wound-up and aggressive performance where he seems to fly off the handle and get angry in just about every single line of dialogue. He’s the most alive character there but also the most unlikeable. The only name on the credits heard from again was Ed French who conducted the makeup effects and work on numerous other films including Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Creepshow II (1987) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), among others.
The Dead Come Home/The House on Tombstone Hill/Dead Dudes in the House was a directorial debut for J(ames) Riffel. Elsewhere, Riffel has made Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror (1991), which dubs Night of the Living Dead (1968) with a comedy soundtrack and various sequels that do the same with other films. Elsewhere, Riffel has made the thriller Black-Eyed Susan (2004) and the unreleased Mass of Angels (2004).
Trailer here