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 You've got a "gang of ruthless thugs" who decide to rob some old people.
Things get screwed up when the old guy's clocks turn back time. They claim
that this one is a "stylish shocker" and that director Lucio Fulci is
"recognized the world over as the sultan of splatter". 1989, 84 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This is the companion TV movie that Lucio Fulci did with The Sweet House Of Horrors for some TV series in Italy that was to consist of these two movies and two
movies from Umberto Lenzi. Despite this sounding suspiciously like it stemmed
from the same really smooth brain that came up Mego and She's The Sheriff, unlike those two milestones in kidney-stone television someone over in Italy
had the good sense to never air them. Of course, this being America, someone
(Shriek Show) had the good sense to release the Fulci movies over here on
twenty dollar DVDs. The Lenzi movies have also just managed to snag DVD
releases on the Vipco label over in the UK for thirty bucks each. Those of you
with PAL capable DVD players, access to your roommate's credit card, and
questionable taste are encouraged to procure those posthaste. There's really
only two things you need to know about The House Of Clocks. One is that it is better than The Sweet House Of Horrors. The other is that The Sweet House Of Horrors is the only movie that it's
better than. I won't sit here and tell you that it made a lick of sense or that
its story was any better than The Sweet House Of Horrors, because that would
be a lie and we all know that I only lie to my ex-wife and her team of snotty
attorneys. Nope, while I pretty much understood what was happening in The
House Of Clocks, I just didn't understand why. Lucio managed to achieve the
same effect in the other movie, but I found this one less painful to sit
through, but that would have to be chalked up to the absence of those two
little kids and their dumb little will-o-wisp friends that visited them at
night in The Sweet House Of Horrors . Lucio had the good sense to ditch the floating flames in this one too (as
well as a good chunk of the nauseating POV shots that he relied so heavily on
in that sweet house of his), though this one did feature a cat in a plastic
bag.  I'm guessing that the gimmick in this series of movies is that it's all about
really
scary stuff that happens in houses. What tipped me off to that (other than the
titles of all these movies) is that both of Fulci's flicks start out by having
some character wandering around a house and then something happens (well,
that's a good start I suppose). In this case, we have one of the ugliest dames
you'll ever lay your peepers on, all prune faced and dressed in her prison grey
outfit discovering the bodies of a couple of people in some locked room in the
house that she is the housekeeper for. The room is some type of chapel and
these two people are laid out in coffins like they're ready for viewing, except
their faces are kind of messed up and they both have railroad spikes sticking
out of their necks. These two turn out to have been the niece and nephew of
the kindly old couple that owns the house. These old people are poster
children for why nursing homes should be lockdown facilities. Old Man is the
kind of distinguished chap who dotes on his cat so much that he kills birds for
it and then dumps the bird on the floor so the cat can eat it. Old Lady is the
kind of grandmotherly sort who works in her garden and has a pike laying around
just in case she needs to impale the snoopy and disagreeable housekeeper.
This is really the first gross out scene in the movie. The housekeeper gets
stabbed really low in the midsection (If she were a guy it might have been her
nads!) and we get a good lingering look at all these animal guts dumping out of
the hole in her stomach. Luckily, Old Lady has a one-eyed handyman on staff to
dig a grave for her. We also find out that Old Man and Old Lady killed their
niece and nephew because they were after their really sweet house (or am
thinking of another movie?). Just so we don't think these oldsters are complete
villains they do maintain a rather extensive picture collection of their
deceased niece and nephew.  Even though all the nonsense involving the old timers, their gutted
housekeeper, dead relatives, and vision-impaired help, would be more than
enough to make up a really loaded horror film, it turns out that all of that
was merely the set-up for the real story! And what a story it turns out to be!
See, there's these three young people (we'd call them punks where I'm from)
and they've decided to go rob these old people. Why? Who knows? For some
reason though, it involves them making a long drive, so I can only
guess it's because they've already robbed everyone in their own neighborhood.
There's two guys, a girl, and even though this was an Italian movie, there was
no sign of a pizza place, but they did stop at a grocery store. Lucio shows
his "talent" at padding an hour long effort until an almost-movie length 84
minutes by including this really unimportant sequence. The threesome go into
the store and the girl distracts the shopkeeper while her cohorts steal food.
How does she distract him? By handing him a pair of her flimsy panties and
asking him if he stocks those kind. Uh, I know that sounds a bit dopey, but
you have to admit there's been times when you've been in Safeway and wish it
was a Victoria's Secret, right? Anyway, this guy is busy sniffing her drawers
(seriously!) and her buddies are shoving bags of oranges inside their jackets!
Back in the car, she whines about what they stole and one of the guys rattles
off the list of crap they lifted showing her the fact that they pretty much had
a Ponderosa buffet in their pants and that she had nothing legitimate to
complain about. He punctuates that point by pulling a toy gun on her and
holding it to her head. I thought that was kind of irresponsible of the movie.
I mean, there I am trying to show my stepkids a good time on my weekend visit
by watching a scary little flick with them and Lucio decides to put this bit of
junk in there where any kid might be influenced to try it out later with the
guns in my living room.  Their trip to the old timers' house is uneventful except for the discovery that
a cat has stowed away with them in their car. This is a great scene where the
dude in the back seat happens to look down at the floor and sees a cat sitting
there and says "we got us a little stowaway" or something to that effect.
Don't you just hate when stray cats sneak into your car while you're shoplifting
from grocery stores? For some reason the guy puts the cat in a plastic bag and
leaves it laying on the floor to suffocate. Believe it or not, this will
actually be a very important plot point at the end of the movie. Once they
arrive at the house, the girl pretends she has car trouble ("I think there's a
cat stuck in my alternator") and that's when her two pals bust in to steal some
valuable stuff, like all these clocks that Old Man collects. There's a problem
when old One Eye shows up with a shotgun and the next thing you know, One Eye
gets conked on the head, Old Lady gets blasted in the chest and Old Man gets
killed as well. This is about the time the scariest part of the movie happens.
Just when it seems like the movie is half done, all the clocks and watches in
the movie start spinning backwards! For a movie where you're constantly
pleading with your DVD player to make it go faster, the last thing you're
wanting to see is time going in reverse. Oh and I have no clue as to why these
dumb clocks are turning back time, but I was still stuck on how a cat sneaks
into your car, so I may not have been paying as much attention as I should have
when the clocks starting doing their thing. As time goes backwards the
oldsters come back to life, the niece and nephew come back to life and even the
housekeeper gets another run when she pops out of her grave. At first all this time travel seems to benefit Old Man and Old Lady since this
means they can get revenge on these three dirtbags, but when Niece and Nephew
get revived it turns out that they are still holding a grudge for getting
spikes pounded into their throats. The old folks and One Eye chase the three
amigos around their house and even get an assist from the housekeeper whose
hands are sticking out of her grave and holding one of the guys, but the old
timers are
ultimately undone by Niece and Nephew. Memorably, Old Man is killed (again)
when he gets impaled on a bunch of spikes that just happen to be laying around
in the chapel where Niece and Nephew were laid to rest. Eventually we are back
in the car with the girl and it turns out that she was just dreaming all of
this and so were her two boyfriends and they decide that it wouldn't be a good
idea to rob the house after all. It also turns out that the cat in the plastic
bag is still alive and once it gets loose it scratches the driver on the face
and this causes him to drive off the road and down a pretty rough hill where
they all died, though I would probably have to list the cat as being MIA since
I wasn't sure if it was dead or jumped out to safety before it's revenge scheme
came to fruition. This is all typical late Fulci TV fare where production
values, acting, and story all compete to see which is the shoddiest. Clearly
everyone in this movie was scum and there wasn't any explanation about the
clocks, though since it was all a shared dream it didn't necessarily need to
make any sense, except for why these three all had the same dream. If you're a
hardcore fan who doesn't embarrass easily, you'll probably own up to
recognizing one of the young punks from his starring role in Umberto Lenzi's Black Demons and the girl from her role in Fulci's Voices From Beyond. As has been the case
with their recent releases, Shriek Show provides us with a couple of interviews
from the cast. You get Old Man babbling incoherently about how he broke a rib
in one scene, but the real showstopper is the interview with the housekeeper.
She spends close to ten minutes complaining bitterly about how she had to lay
in a box underground for a half hour when she was buried in her grave and once
she was done no one told her how tough and brave she was for doing it. God, it
was
a movie that no one ever saw, no one ever cared about, and no one would ever
admit working on. Get over it! It's not like you ever had to sit through the
damn thing!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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