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 Orphaned children get themselves adopted and everyone moves into the dead
parents' house. Their new parents want to leave the house, but the house
doesn't want to let the kids go. They claim there is a "blood-curdling truth"
we will learn about the parents' death. 1989, 85 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
I've long ago given up trying to figure out which of
Lucio Fulci's movies was the very worst. I remember
affixing that tag to no less than four of five of his
previous outings and after sitting dumbfounded through
another of his made-for-Italian-TV movies, I am
tempted to declare that surely, absolutely,
positively, beyond a shadow of all doubts that this
must truly be his most abysmal film of all time. I am
tempted to say all that, but I'm going to hold off
because while The Sweet House Of Horrors manages to
combine all sorts of things I hate in movies like
this, there's still several more Fulci movies out
there, peering at me blank-eyed like a roach peeking
out from under the fridge, just daring me to bend over
and engage it in battle, knowing full well that
shortly after declaring victory I will notice another
set of hairy legs a little further back. So I'm
going to suspend my search for Fulci's worst movie
ever and be content in the knowledge that this
particular bit of film-flatulence is probably Fulci's
worst of 1989. Unless of course, his other
made-for-Italian-TV movie that year, The House Of Clocks ,
is his worst of 1989 (I see that one staring blankly
at me, just waiting for me to turn on the light so
that it can scurry away). Now then, even though I'm
not officially going to make a determination about
where this one fits in Fulci's pantheon of embarrassing
paydays, unofficially this one has to be his worst.
This wasn't one of those "boring bad" kind of deals
like Touch Of Death or Sodoma's Ghost or Demonia.
This one went on into that territory where it's so bad
you're kind of giggling, but after the first five
minutes of this, you're gnashing your teeth, and by
the twenty minute mark, you begin to wonder whether
this wasn't all some sort of elaborate joke played on
the audience by Lucio, as if Andy Kaufman had decided
to make a horror movie so annoying that the real point
of it was to see how riled up he could get the
paying crowd before they'd riot.  The movie opens up with the soft, cheap focus that
you've come expect from Fulci TV movies and it
makes you wonder if his real camera equipment had been
repo-ed or something, because I don't remember any of
the movies he made before he was forced onto Italian
TV (somebody really needs to send me a report about
the state of Italian TV - does this stuff really pass
as entertainment? What kind of channels do you people
have over there? Do you need us to go in and liberate
your airwaves for you?) looking this ugly, regardless
of their overall stupidity. In fact, amazingly
enough, the special effects in these TV movies
actually look worse than the ones he did for the
movies a decade before! It's like Lucio regressed as
his career went along so that by the time he was
finished, the guy making really bad student films for
TV bore no resemblance to the guy that made Don't Torture A Duckling! To further drive home the fact
that the slickest thing you'll see in this movie is
the DVD packaging from Shriek Show is the very generic
and very repetitive synthesizer score in this movie.
Dario Argento may have been able to get Ennio
Morricone to score his films, but Lucio always had
Yamaha (or was it Casio this time?). And since you
brought up Shriek Show's packaging, I think I should
mention that the people who worked on this release
were clearly influenced by the amateurishness of the
movie inside, since they decide to reproduce a stupid
quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne on the back that the
movie included, but instead credit to a guy they call
"M. Hawthorne". Uh, that's great. I'm glad to see
little brother Mathaniel Hawthorne get some run since
it was always big brother that got all the hype, even
if it was on the back of the DVD to what is
unofficially "Worst Fulci Ever". Along with the
canned music and fuzzy shots (I was checking to see if
I had suddenly developed cataracts), the movie
introduces us to the first two of about nine of the
rankest characters ever put together outside of a Detroit Tigers
starting line up.  You've got your husband and wife and they're coming
home from somewhere babbling about how their kids are
away at boarding school and how they wonder if their
gardener is inside stealing all their stuff and
whether he's going to kill them once they surprise him
in the middle of the theft. Maybe they really don't
wonder all that, but they should have since that's
exactly what happened. The husband and the gardener
(he wears a mask, but they make it clear he's Guido
the Gardener in pretty short order) get into a big
fight and it ends with hubby getting his head bashed
in, but since this is a Fulci movie, there's chunks of
brain falling out of his head as it gets bashed
against the wall. Then wifey gets chased down and
ends up trapped in the kitchen. I always breathe a
sigh of relief whenever Lucio takes us into the
kitchen, because someone is about to get some type of
kitchen utensil shoved in their eye and that's why
I'm laying down my neighbor's forged check at Wal-Mart
for this movie in the first place. Sure enough, Guido
decides to play Iron Chef and grabs something that
must have been a meat tenderizer and stamps wifey's
face several times causing her eye to kind of dislodge
(along with a lot of other damage). Then we have to
watch him dispose of the bodies by pushing their car
off of a cliff and the next stop is the funeral. The
funeral scene really shows you that by this time in
his life Lucio had absolutely no idea what he was
doing and I'm amazed that anyone financing these
movies saw the footage and didn't stick a boot in his
ass and tell him to get back out there and do it so
right, or at least do it so it would be presentable.
He uses the camera to play the part of the grieving
kids and this results in various people looking right
at us and saying they're really sorry and I'm
thinking, "no, I'm really sorry" and then these people
will kneel down pat the "head" of the camera! As much
as that gimmick flopped, it got even worse when he
decided to switch to the actors playing the kids and
leave the subjective film angle behind.  The murdered couple's kids, Marco and Sarah are the
worst child actors I think I've run across in these
Italian films. Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you
that I expect every kid to possess the natural talents
of the kid that played Bobby in House By The Cemetery because there aren't that many ten year old
boys that have big pouty lips, blonde hair and a
girl's voice, but these two twerps made you wish that
Guido the Gardener might invite them over for some shish kabobs or something.
These kids are laughing,
then they're crying, then they're babbling about stuff
that doesn't make any sense, all while they are the
recipients of a dub job so poorly done that I couldn't
even make out most of what they were saying at the
funeral. The worst part of all this is that they get
even worse as the movie goes along, though you are
able to understand them better (unfortunately). Since
these two kids are now orphans, it's up to their aunt
and uncle to look after them and they do this instead
of just sending them back to boarding school like all
of us would have done. They decide that since they
have to look after these two retarded brats that they
are just going to move into the house of the dead
parents. I guess it was a pretty sweet house (or so
the title of the film claims), but I ain't leaving my
trailer for some house that a couple of folks got all
killed in and stuff. You just know there's going to
be restless spirits, cursed toys, and murderous
staircases and stuff there. Plus, the thing looked
like a real bitch to heat. The movie goes pretty much
schizo on us from here on out as you assume that it's
going to be one of these deals where mommy and daddy's
ghost are out to get that rotten Guido for killing
them. Well, Guido goes nuts about halfway into the
movie after painting part of the house and gets
attacked by a big dog or run over by a truck.
Actually both happened but he was just imagining the
dog. The truck though was very real. The aunt whines
about these toys in the attic (uh-oh) that look and
act all sinister, but no one seems to question why the
kids have all their dolls hanging from nooses up there
- they're just irritated that they look scary in the
dark along with the wind up insect toy with the
glowing eyes. (What? Didn't you have one of those when
you were a kid?) Guido, along with the parents, are the ones who get
off lucky in this one, since they're dead before it
ends. With Guido dead and fully half the movie to go,
Lucio shifts gears and makes this a movie about the
house not wanting to let the kids go. Let's see. The
dead parents always had their ill-behaved tykes
stashed away at a boarding school while they were
alive, but now that they're all dead, they want to
keep the kids near them at the house? So how are they
able to accomplish this? Pretty much the way anything
in these kinds of movies is accomplished: Lucio goes
out and rents a fog machine! As predictable as that
is, things turn laughable when the aunt and uncle are
trying to drive the kids through the fog and their
jeep is levitated in the air. If that happened to me,
I would recline my seat back, crank up the tunes and
just chill. I'd never let a bunch of vengeful
spirits sweat me, but then that's just my Gary,
Indiana upbringing. In addition to all that, the
ghosts of the parents and the house bother the lard ass
realtor who comes by to sell the house for the aunt
and uncle. It causes him to fall down the stairs,
then it blows a really big wind at him (ghost-farts, no
doubt), and finally it causes this steam shovel he
brought to tear the house down with to swing to and
fro wildly. I suppose the best part of this movie is
that the kids call this guy Sausage. I don't know
why, but they did. They also laughed incessantly
whenever this guy got hurt, which is a course of
action I routinely endorse, but they were so
unrelenting in it, that even I turned on them! There's a ridiculous bit about two hovering flames
that must represent the parents as well as a horrid
bit with some medium dressed in black and speaking in
one of those medium-style accents that I always
associate with the likes of Bela Lugosi. The movie
ends with the medium taking a stone away from one of
the kids that had been glowing moments before and this
causes his hand to melt. It goes without saying that
when this happens the kids bust a gut. This is
an insanely messed up experience and it just looks
like Fulci didn't have a clue what he was doing, with
the plot gyrating back and forth between various
elements that never fit together, never interested the
viewer, and never explained anything. Usually, the
extras on the Shriek Show DVDs are worth looking at,
especially if a movie is really inept like this one
is, but the four interviews included with cast and
crew don't add anything of interest and can be safely
skipped. Shriek Show must have known what a dog they
had on their hands when they wrote up the liner notes
included on the DVD (so what are they lining?) and
said that this movie has met with "mixed" reaction
among viewers and that it should be remembered for its
weirdness above all else. If I were writing those
liner notes I think I would emphasize to potential
viewers that the movie features a fat guy named
Sausage. That's about as good a spin as you'll be
able to put on this one.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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