Crow Hollow

“Don’t let him take you to Crow Hollow.” A good old-fashioned mystery in the Gothic noir style, Michael McCarthy’s Crow Hollow shares a premise with Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940): a naïve, young girl marries a man she hardly knows (Donald Houston), who whisks her off to his dark and mysterious English estate, complete with a cold, possessive housekeeper. But, that’s where the similarities end: unlike Hitchcock’s masterpiece of romantic suspense, Crow Hollow is a low-budget whodunit in which the young wife Anne (Natasha Parry) is haunted not by the ghost of a first wife, but by three very much alive spinsters (Esma Cannon, Nora Nicholson, Susan Richmond), her husband’s aunts, who seem to want her gone by any means necessary, including the bite of a giant, hairy spider on her back (the silliness of the prop used is unfortunate). The aunts are both creepy and comical (“Why do you always have to kill everything, Judith?”), the housekeeper Willow (Patricia Owens) silently intimidating (she “slinks about like a snake, a very pretty snake”), and the dozens of crows call from outside at the most chilling moments. While the mystery may be solved a bit too tidily at the end, Leonard’s use of extensive mirror reflections adds complexity, and DeWolfe’s eerie score adds a tad of terror where needed, such as Anne’s poison-induced dream state.