It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2022) As unremarkable and unintentionally humorous as It Happened at Lakewood Manor is, you can add it to the list of terrible 1970s horror movies that featured Classic Hollywood stars in some of their last roles. Here, it’s Myrna Loy concluding a fifty-year career with a role as the elderly owner of a hotel about to be taken over by… ants. Aggressive poisonous ants, sure, but ants nonetheless. To say that it’s unconvincing is putting it mildly: no amount of ominous musical stings and close-ups of ants crawling over walls can quite bring this to the level expected of a horror film. (And I say this as someone who once successfully fought an ant invasion in the walls of my bedroom.)  No, it’s not supposed to be a comedy—but maybe it could have been better had it tried to be. To be fair, It Happened at Lakewood Manor was made for TV, with a consequence lack of care for anything resembling posterity—or stars other than Loy, Robert Foxworth or Suzanne Sommers. There are a few interesting moments here, especially if you’re wondering how they’re going to milk anything out of a premise such as “poisonous ants terrorize hotel!”  Still, this isn’t anything for the ages. It’s perhaps worth one “I can’t believe they made a film about that” look, or see how Loy ended her career, but that’s it.