I can't imagine going to a strange house in the middle of the night and asking if I could stay there until the weather improved, but the movie made this seem perfectly plausible. Driving in a rain storm in a 1920's convertible looked terrible. There were no windows on the sides and the road wasn't paved or marked and the headlights weren't that good. And the couple's wise-cracking friend in the backseat wouldn't shut up.
It may have been less plausible that the eccentric old brother and sister who lived there employed a hulking mute butler (Boris Karloff) who turns violent and attacks women when drunk. They mention the family members locked in rooms upstairs.
For the first 50 minutes, it was more social awkwardness than horror. They're eat dinner. An obnoxious couple comes to the door and burst in without being invited. They hang around and hang around. One of the women goes to a bedroom to change her clothes, leaves the window wide open with wind and rain blowing in and doesn't tell anyone. They're not good guests.
There's a nice scene of one of the women who starts doing shadow puppets. They stole that scene in cheap slasher film, set in the U.S. but filmed in New Zealand. I can't remember the title or why I turned it on.
Things start to go wrong in the last 20 minutes.
Available on The Criterion Channel and on Tubi.
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