A year or so after George C Scott was spooked by a cadaverous child in 'The Changeling', Devere decides to try and keep up with her ex-husband's career by inheriting an Old Dark House from her deceased aunt. This affords sundry opportunities for neighbours to give her dirty looks, a priestly Joseph Cotten to pop up and proffer ubiquitous blarney, and the titular carriage of death to keep turning up outside the front door heralded by mist-machine overkill.<br /><br />In terms of supernatural 80s horror movies this is acceptable enough for undiscerning nostalgists; though purists may balk that the central things-going-bump-in-the-bedroom sequence between Trish and her resident toyboy handyman Gautreux sets the whole picture at odds with the otherwise PG-compliant avoidance of physical horror and narrative suspense. And just when you thought it was safe to go back into the shower... it is.<br /><br />Whilst it is fair enough comment to make that no-one (probably rightly so) took Devere seriously again after her split with Scott, she at least here proves herself a capable enough genre screamer for the undemanding. What is more interesting however, is how suspiciously similar this film is in terms of plot and style/construction to the soon-after 'The Nesting' - in that it misses most of its most crucial horror 'cues', but nevertheless burns independently down its own vaguely self-stylised 'fuse' to an incoherent, unsatisfying 'explanatory' climax. This also, but slightly more exclusively, involved a has-been actress ignominiously doing very little for the money (Gloria Grahame in that particular instance).