Set in 1954, six guests: a Senator's wife (Eileen Brennan), a widow (Madeline Kahn), an ex-psychiatrist (Christopher Lloyd), a homosexual (Michael McKean), an ex-Army Colonel (Martin Mull) and a madam (Lesley Ann Warren) are invited to a secluded mansion in the hills for a dinner party by a host (Lee Ving) they have never met. Once there, the host's true motives become known: all six guests and the butler (Tim Curry) are being blackmailed by their "host". I'm a sucker for murder mysteries (straight or comedic) set in large creepy mansions with secret passages and the passing of Eileen Brennan this week led me to revisit this old favorite. The humor is inconsistent but all the actors have expert comedy timing and they act the hell out of it. Whether it's Brennan getting hysterical when she thinks she's been poisoned, Kahn responding to the number of husbands she's had or McKean struggling to hold up an overweight corpse; these are actors who know how to get the most out of a comic moment. The house itself is a humdinger of a Gothic mansion (John Robert Lloyd and Thomas Roysden did the art and set direction) and director Jonathan Lynn wisely keeps things moving a mile a minute. Surprisingly a failure when first released, the film now has quite the cult following. With Colleen Camp, Bill Henderson, Jeffrey Kramer and Jane Wiedlin (of The Go-Go's).
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