***SPOILERS*** What was obviously inspired by the 1979 movie "The Amityville Horror" the Hammer series episode "The House that Bled" to its credit goes a step farther in explaining what happened in a well placed surprise or twist ending that ties up all the loose as well as bloody ends in the movie together. There's the usual unsuspecting family the Peters who buy their dream house in the country that turns out to be haunted by the previous owners of the place. That's when the husband murdered his wife and chopped her up with a pair of Kurki knives and ended up sentenced to life in an institution for the criminally insane. It's when William Peters, Nicholas Bail, and his wife Emma, Rachel Davis, and their 8 year old daughter Sophia, Emma Ridley, moved in strange things started to happen that ended up driving the family up the wall and out of the house.A first the family cat Timmy was found hacked to death and into pieces as well as someone's severed and bloody hand was found in the fridge. Things reach a crescendo when at a birthday party for Sophia a pipe broke open and flooded the place with blood that drove everyone at the party totally batty. With the news of the house's strange activities making headline it ended up getting the attention of a number of major movie studios to get the rights from the Peter family to make a movie about it who ended up millionaires.***SPOILERS**** Set for life with a new house with a swimming pool and tennis court and no financial problems the Peter's were in for a big surprise at the very end of the movie. It was their daughter Sophia depressed since her pet cat Timmy was found hacked to pieces who found a book, that her parents had hidden, about the house and the family who previously lived in it! Its then that Sophia realized what was really behind all the horrors that happened there: The achievement by her parents of using the house for both Fame & Fortune. And with that she took matters as well as a deadly Kukri knife into her own hand and meted out justice!

We all love a good haunted house story. Sadly, this episode seems to relish in the gory details of childhood trauma more than anything else. Sophie the child protagonist has everything that she has grown attached to or been gifted eventually brutalized and destroyed right in front of her. It is truly one emotional trauma after another, replete with blood, murdered pets, dolls' broken limbs, stuffed white rabbits and other - by today's standards - clichés. It gets sickening and predictable and very hard to enjoy for some presumed suspense alone. The ending, too, takes a back seat to the disturbing theme of "good girl gone bad" as little Sophie starts to take an obvious interest and a degree of pleasure in the relentless violence that surrounds her.

From memory this was the stand out episode from HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR . If there's any flaws to it then it's a very conscious reworking of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and suffers from obvious and obvious exposition where characters relate things to one another that they'd already know as in " We've been here in California for three years now and ... " but from what I've seen via my recent rewatching of the show this looks like remaining the best of a relatively invariable mediocre set of stand alone horror stories You can perhaps work out what the twist is going to be at the end and to its credit the internal logic of the story states that there's no such thing as the supernatural which is a blatant and undisguised attack on the credibility of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR writer Jay Anson and the Lutz family . There is an element of contrivance in that someone must do something such as faint in order for the plot to progress and someone has to be in the right place at the right time but the credibility just about works , probably down to the fact William Peters works as a hospital porter which gives you a large clue as to how someone can have access to blood and severed hands One amusing back stage story was from Brian Croucher who mentioned that the cast kept corpsing every time they saw the stuffed prop for Timmy the cat , something that's not reflected on screen since the death of Timmy is fairly shocking . It is very noticeable that just before the climatic scene at the children's birthday party the young cast are enjoying the fact that they know what's going to happen next and are enjoying themselves a little bit too much , this sums up the episode which is very enjoyable

Out of the first five episodes of Hammer's short-running "Hammer House of Horror" series, this fifth episode with the wonderful title "The House that Bled to Death" is arguably the creepiest one. As a great fan of the Hammer Studios' Gothic Horror films for many years, I wonder what took me so long to finally start watching the series quite recently. So far, I've only seen the first five episodes, and I have a strong feeling that the best is yet to come, but even if the series stays as entertaining as the first five episodes are, I will be satisfied. Whereas the second and third episodes were great to watch for their morbid and ingeniously dark sense of humor, this fifth entry is definitely the one out of the first five that delivers the most genuine Horror. The episode begins when an elderly man murders his wife out of unknown motivations. Years later, William (Nicholas Ball) and Emma Peters (Rachel Davies) move in the house with their little daughter Sophie (Emma Ridley). Soon after moving in, however, the family have to find out that there is something terribly wrong with the house, which is seemingly haunted... The second episode directed by Francis Megahy is a lot better than his mediocre previous entry, "Growing Pains" (Episode 4), and the fairly unknown actors deliver good performances. The film is also well-made in terms of effects, cinematography and score. "The House that Bled to Death" is a solid episode that delivers the elements that my fellow Hammer-fans should like to see in a Short Horror tale. The film delivers a creepy atmosphere, genuine scare moments and intelligent twists, and is suspenseful and highly entertaining from the beginning to the end. Overall, this is highly recommendable to Hammer fans.