Sorting out the whys and whens of House of the Black Death is a lot more interesting than actually sitting through it. Even the actual title is unclear – it was shot in 1965 as Night of the Beast, a version copyrighted 1966 bears the best-known title of House of the Black Death though it may not actually have been released theatrically until 1971 when it surfaced as Blood of the Man Devil. Under any name, it’s a dull effort that will test the resolve of even the most hardened fans of its two leads, Lon Chaney Jr and John Carradine who, for reasons not at all clear, never actually share a scene together despite playing brothers.

Owing debts to both the previous year’s Witchcraft (which had also starred Chaney) and The City of the Dead (1960), the drab story takes place in the small town of Widderburn (the film was based on R. Warner-Crozetti’s novel The Widderburn Horror) built on a cramped soundstage where the Desard (pronounced De Sade) family are at loggerheads. Brothers Belial (Chaney), who sports devil horns beneath his Satanist’s cowl, and Andre, both warlocks, have been feuding for some time over the family fortune. Belial and his coven (or co-ven as one of the cast members insists on pronouncing it) of witches has been using his black magic powers to entrance various family members while the ailing Andre finds it a struggle to even get out of bed. In their latest bout, Belial has turned Andre’s son into one of the rattiest looking werewolf you will ever see before Andre manages to stir himself from his deathbed long enough to make Belial disappear in a puff of smoke (at a distance of course and never actually in the same shot) during a satanic ritual. All this is peppered with scenes of Belial watching belly dancers (one of them played by British model/actress Sabrina) dancing for him, various family members so dull you forget about them even while they’re still on-screen pop in and out of the feeble plot and a Greek chorus of witches (one of them played by Warren perennial Katherine Victor, so it’s not hard to work out who shot these scenes) occasionally comments on the action.

The latter scenes appear to have been shot by the nefarious Jerry Warren after original director Harold Daniels had finished his version in 1965. Daniels – with some help from his second unit director Reginald Le Borg – had turned up with just about an hour of footage and producers Richard Shotwell and William White had called in Warren to help pep things up a bit. Warren was getting a reputation for this sort of thing at the time, having only recently rejigged Rafael Portillo’s Mexican horror La momia azteca (1957) into Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1964), mixing the same film with Gilberto Martínez Solares’s La casa del terror (1960) to make Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) and forcing Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Brazilian crime thriller Mãos Sangrentas (1955) into The Violent and the Damned (1962).

The resulting mess was so incoherent that even Warren recognised its shortcomings. “They had a terrible mishmash of a movie,” he told Fred Olen Ray in his book The New Poverty Row. “It’s wasn’t a movie, it was a bunch of film. It came out bad but it came out playable, and it did pull out some money for the people who made it.” Imagine… a film so awful that even Jerry Warren, the man who gave the world Man Beast (1956), The Incredible Petrified World (1959) and Teenage Zombies (1957) thought it was “bad.” And he wasn’t wrong. Fans of Carradine and Chaney will instinctively be drawn to it but will be disappointed that the two old troopers are both looking the worse for wear, particularly a bloated and puffy Chaney, and by the fact they never appear onscreen together.

Surrounding them are a lot of very poor actors who stand around in Satanist’s cowls talking nonsense about Belial and apparently worshipping someone named Satanas, no effort is made to make their village look like anything but the artificial set it actually is and it comes to something when the most exciting parts of a supposed horror film are the belly-dancing routines. And they’re not all that special. The direction, from all three directors – Le Borg claimed to have only actually shot a few scenes of people skulking around in a forest – is perfunctory at best, no-one involved showing any kind of style or any flair for atmosphere. Daniels, a former editor, had enjoyed a patchy career as a director, moistly making undistinguished and largely forgotten thrillers or episodes of television dramas, though he’d given us a warning of what to expect with My World Dies Screaming (1958), aka Terror in the Haunted House. House of the Black Death was his penultimate film, his last possibly being the hard-to-pin-down Diabolic Wedding /Annabel Lee, a Peruvian-shot horror filmed in English- and Spanish-language versions in 1968. Whether they were made by the same Harold Daniels is up for debate… Whatever, the one thing we can say for certain is that House of the Black Death is very shoddy and very, very dull, an awful mess of a film that serves only to, like so many films of its ilk, make Satanists look like the dullest people you could ever meet. It’s not much of accomplishment, but it’s all this dreadful film has to offer.