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 Some whores and German soldiers "indulge in orgiastic behaviour" at the close
of World War II at an "isolated country house". One of the soldiers films it,
but it all ends when the allies bomb them. In the present day, six "teenagers"
show up at the house and stay the night. When they try to leave, they can't
and "find themselves locked in, with the ghosts of Sodom". 1988, 85 minutes, DVD
Eight years before his death, Lucio Fulci was still fairly active on the
Italian horror scene cranking up the fog machine on no less than three
different pictures (though he bailed out of Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 or whatever you want to call it before it was whatever passed for finished).
Of course just because you're still getting shots in the can, doesn't
necessarily mean that you're doing anything worthwhile. This was after all
about five years after what you'd have to call Lucio's pinnacle, though the
idea that any year that included a film as stupid as The Black Cat was remotely related to the pinnacle of anything seems a bit disingenuous. In
any case, Sodoma's Ghost is actually really quite a good little Fulci movie. No it isn't! I was just
toying with you! It's as stinky as the unshaven armpits of the Euroskanks that
appear frequently without nearly enough clothes on in this movie. I was just
tired of starting every review of a Fulci movie with what has rapidly become
the rallying cry of these reviews: Worst Fulci Movie Ever! And feel free to
do the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons when you say that. Besides it isn't anywhere near being the worst Fulci
movie ever. Manhattan Baby , Demonia, and The Black Cat all have some legitimate claim (thus far - remember we haven't take a look at
nearly all of Lucio's later output) to that most coveted of Italian gore
titles. If anything, this movie suffers from a lack of anything resembling
Fulci's fingerprints on it, for good or ill. There's little gore, little
imaginatively staged deaths, no whacky camera shots (there is some hand held
stuff at the beginning, but you can write that off as just being POV stuff
representing one of the characters shooting his own home movies), and if it
wasn't for the front of the DVD box proclaiming this one to be Lucio's baby, I
wouldn't have ever guessed that he was involved. I suppose I probably would
have suspected that he was involved in the *cough* scripting of it, but not the
directing of it.  The movie takes a similar premise as the hideous Demonia in that it involves the ghosts or spirits or whatever of some long dead bad
guys that materialize where they died years ago to harass, haunt, and hump the
dopes that wander into their clutches. Instead of horny nuns from the middle
ages bothering archeologists that show up at their church in the present, we
have American college students being spooked by horny Nazis at the French villa
they occupied during the second world war. By the way, we know that these are
American college students because they tell each other that. It's a good thing
too, because otherwise I would have just assumed that they were talentless
Italian actors making about 30 lira a day plus tips or something. The movie
begins back during the war when the Nazis were busy taking over the world by
cavorting with French whores. Lucio realizes quickly that this bare idea of a
plot he has will need to be fleshed out by ample bits of flesh, so this
orgiastic night at the villa goes on and on, with people drinking, drugging,
playing horsie (huh?), and even shooting some pool. (Can someone get this naked
chick off the pool table please?) You've also got one of the
Nazis is running around with a movie camera shooting footage of all this,
presumably for the director's cut of Triumph Of The Will . Just
when you are about firmly convinced that watching a Nazi orgy could be as
boring as going to your grandmother's house on Easter, the allies fly in and
save the day by bombing these perverts straight into the netherworld where they
won't be able to bother anyone's nether regions for the next forty years until
some Italians posing as American students stumble onto their home in the middle
of the French countryside. I would also like to add that the bombing is
embarrassingly bad and is shown only as one really fake explosion that
immediately takes us to the present. I kept hoping the allies would bomb my
trailer taking me somewhere else, but that never happened.  So how exactly do six college students in a Range Rover end up at a haunted
mansion
in the middle of the French countryside? Well, I'm glad you asked, because
I'll tell you what the movie said and you can decide how much sense that makes.
These dullards are on their way to Paris when the driver decides to take a
shortcut. Ahh, the old shortcut gag. Never fails to ensure some sort of gory
encounter, right? In this case though, Fulci isn't content with his shortcut
being along some deserted country road or cursed highway or something I would
readily acknowledge is more than likely to lead to no good. He has these guys
driving on dirt trails, through the woods and across fields where there is
clearly no road, never has been a road and isn't remotely anyplace that
anyone, even a hairy Italian actress portraying a simpleton American college
student could have ever mistaken as being any kind of shortcut to anything,
except maybe to
a busted axel. If you're wondering just why in the heck they're so balls to
the wall to get to gay Par-ee anyway, Lucio has a reason for that also. The
highbeams on the Range Rover don't work, so they need to get somewhere before
dark. As lame as that may be (especially because the sky is blue, the sun is
bright, and nightfall looks to be hours and hours away), this is actually not a
unprecedented plot element in these rotten genre movies. My crack research
staff
has unearthed this very "my car don't have headlights" gimmick in the classic The Astounding She-Monster. I have a new respect for that one now that I know it was so influential.
Anyway, these college kids end up at the haunted mansion and decide to crash
there for the night (though it was obviously about one o'clock in the
afternoon). As they walk in, a Nazi cap lying on the steps mysteriously
vanishes right before our eyes! Now, that seems a might fishy.  Inside the house, the kids find that the power is still on, that one of the
rooms is decorated like a French whorehouse, and that the wine cellar is
stocked with some of that real old wine that's probably wasted on us guys that
fret over the "born on date" displayed on our beer cans. Lucio doesn't quite
nail down that whole "American college student" character he is so desperately
trying to sell us, when he has one of the characters ohh and ahh over the great
vintages they've stumbled across. I did about a semester at my local community
college before deciding to "go in another direction" as we say in the biz, and
I can assure each and every one of you that our college kids would take one
look at this wine cellar, grab the hoses and funnels, gather to the growing
chants of "Chug! Chug! Chug!" and proceed to lighten Frenchie's wine collection
considerably before ending things with a wet t-shirt contest. (To be fair, some
of the guys in this movie do get wasted and it leads to an impromptu session of
Russian Roulette with a Nazi ghost, so they weren't total wash outs.) Anyway,
these college kids sit around doing nothing real interesting in this house
until they finally decide to go to bed. This leads to the up-tight girl having
a wet dream about this Nazi ghost slapping her around and humping her until she
woke up or something. There might have been more to it than that, but this
movie had this really cheap and generically straight-to-video feel to it that
made think I was watching a Waxworks sequel or
something on the USA network fifteen years ago. As the movie played out, it
became apparent that Lucio had gotten paid in advance, so I turned my attention
to this spider that was sitting on the wall next to me. I had noticed it
earlier
in the day and it hadn't moved, but looked to be alive, so I was keeping tabs
on it to see if it was looking like it was going to be one of those deals where
it was going to try and sneak into my ear and lay eggs when I passed out later
that night. My step-sister got bit by a brown recluse several years ago and
lost her leg or sense of smell or something because of it, so I was getting in
this spider's face trying to decide whether it was a recluse or just a harmless
spider that would lay eggs in my head. I tentatively decided against it being a
recluse, chiefly because if it was a recluse, it wouldn't hanging around on my
wall
letting me stare at it, right? So as this movie played out, I kept peeking at
this spider and noticed that in the course of the ninety minutes of the film it
moved about an inch, but moved so slowly I never noticed it. Once the movie was
done, it had ended up exactly where it had started. What was this spider
trying to tell me? What indeed. I suppose I should save my arachnomancy for another time, since you may yet not
be convinced that horny Nazi ghosts bothering drunk college kids isn't really
nearly as good as you would initially suspect (and I know how you are - this
movie didn't buy itself after all). This ghost (seems to mainly be the same
guy that was shooting the home movies of the orgy back during the war) causes
one of the guys to go a little crazy and he gets it on with a woman who turns
out to be a rotting ghost. This causes him to try and kill one of his friends,
but he gets thrown down the stairs and killed for his trouble. Then he sits
there and rots in about an hour, providing one of the few gore scenes in this
fairly bloodless movie. The kids want out at this point in time, but the house
wont let them out and the phone is busted (did I mention that they actually got
out once, but drove around in circles until the were back at the house - yes,
Lucio trots out every haunted house cliche he can remember seeing in other
movies), then they find the footage that
was shot by the ghost and start watching it. The home movie shows the bombs
falling and I began to wonder just who had thought to put the
film in the cannister after the bombs got dropped, but the movie was ending and
I wasn't about to raise my hand and delay dismissal. In the present, bombs also
get dropped on the house as they watch it happen in the movie footage. Everyone
wakes up in a
field next to the bombed out mansion and even the guy that was pushed down the
stairs and was rotting is okay. Now there's little doubt that this movie
should
have been seized at the border by customs officials since it is clearly the
cinematic equivalent of a dirty bomb, but there isn't nearly enough going on
here to even elevate it up to the cruddy heights of Lucio's more strident
mishaps. He seemed a little more interested in the fleshier aspects of things
this time around (Lay off the Viagra pal!) than in any kind of horror stuff.
Nice to know that his attempts at softcore scenes are just as inept as his
later efforts at chills and thrills. The folks at EC Entertainment do their
best to compliment this stinky concoction with their own stinky presentation.
The picture here is really grainy and dirty and is full frame. Did you guys
author this DVD from your copy of this movie that you taped off of late night
Italian TV? The box also promises an artwork gallery as well as English,
French, and Dutch subtitles, but these extras are nowhere to be found on the
disc. Definitely not Worst Fulci Ever, but in the running for Most Slapdash
DVD Ever. And that spider? He was gone when I woke up the next morning. What's
going on here? Did I just have a Charlotte's Web experience? Come back little fella! We've still got The House Of Clocks, Touch Of Death and Voices From Beyond to watch together! Hello?
Anyone?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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