The House of Fear Reviews

Another entry in the highly successful series of Sherlock Holmes films that starred Rathbone as Holmes and Bruce as Watson. After attempting to move Holmes and Watson into the modern WW II era, Universal decided to return the pair to Victorian times for this, one of the better films made at this stage of the series. Rathbone and Bruce are called out to a dreary Scottish mansion where the seven middle-aged members of "the Good Comrades Club" live. It seems that someone is killing off the members one by one. There is a curse on the mansion stating that none of the inhabitants will ever go to the grave whole. The seven members, bachelors with no families, have bought a large insurance policy naming the other members as beneficiaries. The members receive envelopes containing orange pits (harbingers of death according to one African tribe) and then promptly drop dead. They all die in ways which make it impossible to determine their indentities. Rathbone discovers that they have faked their deaths (substituting fresh corpses exhumed from a local cemetery) in order that the lone surviving member might collect the large amount of insurance money and split it with the rest of them.