Bloodbath at the House of Death is a genre parody. A number of the gags are amusing genre digs – like the parody of the Alien (1979) chestburster scene with Everett flailing about in the middle of a dinner table before revealing that he is suffering from a case of bad gas; or of the ghost rape from The Entity (1982) with Pamela Stephenson and her insubstantial assailant sharing a cigarette afterwards; and a merciless dig at Piper Laurie’s crucifixion by knives in Carrie (1976) with a character psychically dispatched by can opener. There are spoofs of various horror movie stylistic cliches – the slasher movie point-of-view shots, the chopping string music on the soundtrack. As always some set pieces work, some don’t – Vincent Price gives what must certainly be the worst performance of his entire career as the coven leader.

The whole affair would have been better off on Everett’s tv show served up as unconnected five-minute skits – that’s all there is to the film, it fails miserably when it tries to assemble the gags into anything more than that. A lot of characters are introduced throughout and given amusingly strange quirks, but then absolutely nothing is done with them. There is no plot to the film at all. This is something that becomes particularly evident at the end, which tapers off without any climax.

Still, how can one dislike a film with exchanges like Pamela Stephenson’s cry of “Watch out – bats!” as she and Everett enter a cellar, whereupon a rain of cricket bats fall on them, and then as Everett picks one up, it causing a hidden entrance to open, which inspires the natural observation, ”Hmmm, must be an opening bat.”