This is the news: another woman has been found murdered and dismembered, this one underneath the famous Hollywood sign! And tonight, the killer adds another victim to his tally, following an elderly drunk back to her home, clonking her over the head, and proceeding to cut her up with an electric carving knife. But what does this have to do with Katharine Packard (Miriam Hopkins), an ageing, former Hollywood star who now is declining in her mansion in the hills? Somehow, she got hold of a bottle of vodka, and managed to get so drunk she fell down the stairs: now she needs a proper nurse...
Here was a misbegotten enterprise that fell through the cracks, despite the efforts of its has been leading lady who managed to pass away from a heart attack before it had seen a decent release, and even after she died it struggled to find an audience. This despite three goes at titling it, from The Comeback (Pete Walker used that one) and Savage Intruder to the name you are most likely to find it under now, Hollywood Horror House. Although the precise details of its production are somewhat murky, we do know it was the sole feature directed by film historian and Marilyn Monroe expert Donald Wolfe.
That he never made anything else in that capacity may set off alarm bells, especially when, on watching it, it appears he took the Kenneth Anger approach to loving the legends of Hollywood, revelling in the darker side of showbiz while sentimentalising about the glamour and the great actresses of yore (and to an extent, their male counterparts as well). To that end, he cast Hopkins, a major star of the nineteen-thirties Golden Age, and added Gale Sondergaard, the cult star whose career faltered when she was blacklisted, and John David Garfield. Who? He was the son of John Garfield, the tragically shortlived and influential movie star of the forties.
Now, you can well understand why Mr Garfield Jr (as the sinister nurse) was not going to be a big star, but also why he was perfect for playing a creep in this; he didn't have his father's raw talent, but he could exude a perverse menace that might not have made for much of a mystery about who the killer was, but did contribute an off-kilter quality to a piece that was already pretty wonky. Many identify this as one of the last gasps of the so-called hagsploitation trend, when ageing former beauties were exploited for their fading looks to play psychologically twisted monsters, about as disrespectful as Hollywood could get and yet cruelly fitting to its "screw 'em up and throw them away" attitude to those celebrities who just didn't have the star power anymore.
It's a tough profession, even to those who do make it to the top, or somewhere near it, and Hopkins was one of the actresses who was not about to fade away without a fight. She could have gone the Rosalind Russell route and simply decide not to quit, behaving as if she was as big as she ever was with her own special vehicles, but she preferred to put her faith in Wolfe who would put her name above the title one more time. This, in effect, meant she was trying to make an impression amid drug trips, salacious flashbacks, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls-style party sequences, and brutal murders splashed with very red fake blood, so she did so by singing gutsily and off-key, indulging in a topless scene, insulting the gay men who would have been her fanbase at this time, and more. Hopkins was well known for her temper and many of her contemporaries could view this as a form of revenge on her, but all credit to her, she went full throttle here. If it looks like a TV movie gone gonzo, there's some entertainment in that. Music by Stu Phillips.
