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 The Vipco release says this is a "chilling haunted house tale with twists and turns that'll keep you guessing" and also mentions that among the cast members, one of them is a "stroppy teenage girl with a face like a slapped arse." . 1987, 91 minutes, DVD
It's another Lara Wendel masterpiece! Mercilessly stinking up the joint in such bottom feeding Italian horror movies from the usual suspects such as Zombie 5: Killing Birds) and Lucio Fulci's The Red Monks, Lara now applies her special brand of standing around looking dumb and sounding even dumber (thanks to the obnoxiously dubbed voice with an accent as ugly as the wardrobe everyone subjects us to throughout), to this haunted house movie from noted Italian master Humphrey Humbert. Humphrey Humbert? Now, that doesn't even sound like a real name let alone an Italian one. Could good old Double H really be an assumed identity for someone else? Someone who was also fond of making stinky Italian horror movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Someone who also made similarly-looking cheese such as Hitcher In The Dark and Black Demons?
Umberto Lenzi, you're not fooling anyone! Well, Lara may have been fooled, but other than her, it's all painfully obvious that you didn't want to sully a reputation built on cannibal and zombie flicks like Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox and Nightmare City with this hauntingly awful tale of a girl and her clown doll that kills hapless people who wear too much denim. Curiously, while Umberto would climb into the Humphrey costume for Hitcher In The Dark, he felt secure enough to take full credit the equally abysmal Black Demons, but in between that movie and this one he invented Bob Collins to direct something called Detective Malone (aka Black Cobra 4) and had Harry Kirkpatrick make the slasher flick Nightmare Beach (aka Welcome To Spring Break). Sometimes the movies you find yourself working on are so rotten you need to spice them up any way you can. It's called role playing.
I never understood stuff like slapping a fake name on a movie like this for a couple of reasons. First and most obvious is that no one is actually going to see it anyway. Did Umberto really think that someone would be sitting in the theater saying, "I can't believe the great Umberto Lenzi is slumming like this!" And really, did Umberto really think that this would ever make it to a theater? And did anyone connected with the film think that someone would be dissuaded from watching it if they knew its Italian origins? "Well, this Ghosthouse looks really good with that Lara Wendel we loved so much in Zombie 5: Killing Birds, but look - some Italian guy directed it, so it must stink. Not like that Zombie 5 which was directed by the very English sounding Claudio Lattanzi (and an uncredited Joe D'Amato). And anyway, I always like these movies that despite their pathetic attempts to Americanize their credits always seem to have one hold out that's a dead give away. Like after budgeting fifty bucks to make Ghosthouse, this "American" movie is going to go all the way to Italy to hire Piero Montanari to provide the bad music? Or get Franco Delli Colli of such classics as Zeder and Rats: Night Of Terror to shoot it? And isn't assistant director Clay Millincamp actually Claudio Lattanzi?
By now you're asking, "but is this a good Humphrey Humbert/Clay Millincamp collaboration?" If by that, what you mean is "does the movie present us with characters we instantly hate and then graphically kills them off giving us a brief instant of satisfaction" then yes, I think it does quite an adequate job. I mean, when that one kid who ran away from her school to join her brother, his girlfriend and another guy to set up and operate a ham radio at a haunted house out in rural Massachusetts got chopped in half, I softly hissed "yesssss!" And when that one guy took a fan blade to the throat, I felt really relaxed by it all. By having his characters dress in mint green shirts, wear denim jackets, denim skirts, and vests of various materials, Humphrey, err, Umberto was able to establish them as people you just couldn't wait to see waxed in the most inhumane ways possible. And that's without even mentioning their hair!
Like most movies of its ilk, Ghosthouse begins with a prologue that takes place twenty years before where this little girl kills a cat on her birthday, so her dad locks her in the basement with her cursed clown doll that he took from a corpse while working at a funeral home. How cliched! Before you know it, light bulbs are bulging and exploding and this guy gets murdered along with his wife. Back in the present, Paul and Martha pick up a strange signal on the ham radio he plays with and is able to use his 1987 computer to track where it originated from to the house where those murders happened. It just so happens that another group of ham radio operators is already there (Massachusetts was just crawling with these freaks in the late 1980s) and they join up to investigate things and get killed.
What follows is monumental stupidity piled atop monumental stupidity as characters behave in the ways that while completely illogical are just what the doctor order to keep the killings coming. After the first guy is found dead, they do the smart thing and call the cops, but then they do the stupid thing and half of them stick around while the other half go back to Boston for further investigation. I always thought that the police would "clear the crime scene" before they left, but even though the lieutenant in charge of things complains that none of this would have ever happened if these dumb kids hadn't been trespassing, he just drives off leaving all these dumb kids hanging out at the murder scene. Car trouble, gals not listening to boyfriends to stay put, and boyfriends leaving gal pals by themselves at the murder scene while the crazed caretaker who had just attacked one of them with a meat cleaver is still running around loose gives you just a whiff of the brain flatulence that is the order of the day in this one.
This one plays out just as you would expect it to with lots of nonsensical and unexplained stuff happening just because Umberto thought it make a good scene. Ghost dogs, floors that collapse and dunk people into liquid that looks like watery paste, heads spinning in washing machines and a guy in a black cloak with a maggoty skull for a face all make appearances without any explanation. If you've seen any of these other Lenzi movies of the era or any of those scuzzy Fulci TV movies like The House Of Clocks, Touch Of Death, or Sodoma's Ghost, you'll know what to expect as far as the technical level of this thing. The movie is as unattractive as its "stars" and it's apparent that no one in front of or behind the camera cared a bit about what was happening. Inexplicably followed by a couple of alleged sequels, Witchery and House 5 (titles may vary depending on where you live), one of which manages to feature both David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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