Cthulhu Mansion is not as bad as it could have been considering it was made by the director of Pod People. And Pieces. And Slugs. Wide Weird World of Cult Films really likes Juan Piquer Simon movies, so he chose this watch, but I’m the one who found it while trolling the depths of IMDb. So this is both our faults.

Synopsis: An illusionist accidentally kills his medium wife (actually she was regular sized) by channeling an Eldritch abomination in front of a live studio audience while Toccata and Fugue in D Minor plays. Next the leader of the cocaine gang from Demons kills the band manager from Pod People on a carnival ride during a drug deal, while the illusionist manages to not kill his daughter doing more tricks. Worlds collide when the cocaine killer kidnaps the Cthulhu killer in order to steal his car and hide at his haunted mansion. The only problem is that the demon from the beginning is behind a door in the basement held in by two measly bolts which the gang leader’s sidekick opens while changing a fuse in the basement. Also, Captain Kirk’s daughter is in this for some reason. Got all that?

What follows is a decently paced collage of scenes ripped off from other horror movies, although I have to admit I have never before seen a jump scare where a loaf of bread flew off a counter like a deck of playing cards. Probably the scariest thing in the movie was that the illusionist had a plate of tuna sandwiches just sitting in a stack on the table all day under a cloth instead of in the fridge as God intended, and one of the kidnappers ate them, but didn’t die of food poisoning because a pair of giant demon hands disappeared her into the refrigerator before the bacteria could do its work. Cthulhu Mansion is overall an entertaining pile of crap, not least of all because you will be surprised by who survives the picture and how.

There is only one thing that bothers me. Now, henchman #2 drowns in a shower full of blood very similar to a scene in the 80s TV movie This House Possessed. But that unlocked an ancient childhood terror for me of a movie character drowning in a shower. It was not any of the following: Nightmare on Elm Street 5, Pulse, the TV show Charmed, Dark Water, or The Cell. I remember the victim was a woman who had pissed off a witch, she went to take a shower, a spell was cast, and then she noticed the water wasn’t going down the drain and she drowned. Do you know what else this could have been?

P.S. I once found erotic fan fiction of Slugs on the internet back in the text based web days, and I didn’t like it.

P.P.S. I realized after writing this and posting it on Facebook that the guy who died in the shower, Paul Birchard, is quite a prolific working actor including a turn on a super creepy episode of Poirot called The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb. He wasn’t on Morse of course of course, but I still had to point out his Poirot credit.