In one corner, you have the dark arts and all their reality-bending power to possess people, kill them, and general ability to string together unconnected scenes of bad special effects mayhem. In the other corner is David “the Hoff” Hasselhoff, lifeguard and talking-car pal.

If you think I’m about to reveal who wins out in this review, forget it! I will tell you though that in true Italian horror movie fashion, a Sesame Street brand tape recorder turns out to be more powerful than both of them combined!

Witchery also supplements the usual Italian hijinks and the Hoff with a cast that could have only appeared in an Italian movie starring the Hoff!

There’s a sweaty and pregnant Linda Blair, the Hoff’s one-time wife Catherine Hickland who also played Virgin in Robowar, but who is now playing a nympho architect, and Leslie Cumming who plays a virgin and whose only other credit was in another Italian trash epic, Zombie 5: Killing Birds!

Like all great ideas, the movie’s story is pretty simple: Eight idiots get themselves stranded at an abandoned island hotel that’s haunted by an old hag witch. In the hands of someone who didn’t direct Contamination .7 this could have been your standard stalk and slash affair where people are picked off one by one in the various deserted rooms of the hotel. To be fair, technically, that is what happens, but director Fabrizio Laurenti does it all with a certain zest for the offbeat.

For most of the movie the Hoff looks to be most upset by his repeatedly rebuffed attempts to lay his virgin friend. For her part the virgin owns every single scene she is in because of utter lack of command of the English language.

At various times she sounds drunk, sleepy, like she has marbles in her mouth, is on a obscene cocktail of prescription drugs, like she’s saying each word for the very first time in her entire life, and as if she’s mentally retarded. That she insists on referring to the Hoff by his unconvincing movie name “Gary” only adds to the audience’s delight.

The Hoff really comes alive in the second part of the film when he abandons his efforts to bust cherry and gets on with busting witches. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the greater good and no one knows this more than the Hoff!

The Hoff is doing everything he can to push back the forces of darkness. He’s dodging flying furniture and falling shutters, he’s getting caught in sliding doors, he’s using a flare gun AND a camera flash bulb to attract rescuers. He’s even tying off a guy’s gushing arm with a necktie tourniquet!

It’s during this scene where the Hoff pulls out all his thespian chops. While trying to help this guy out, he notices his jugular vein is pulsating and the Hoff makes a face like the dude just crapped his pants.

Both the Hoff and us knew what was coming next and just like clockwork the guy’s vein bursts open spewing a geyser of red fluid right in the Hoff’s face! Can imagine how glad the Hoff was when he found out Baywatch was going to be a regular TV series the next year?

But the valiant efforts of the Hoff, the virgin, and the sweaty, pregnant Linda Blair would be wasted if Laurenti couldn’t come through in the horror department. You needn’t worry. Remember, this is the guy who had us watching folks get their eyes poked out by tree roots in Contamination .7!

There’s a good healthy catalog of heinousness in this film to keep pace with his all-star cast. You’ve got a mouth sewn shut, a person or two gets burned alive, there’s a nice crucifixion, a fetus gets gnawed on, an impaling on a swordfish, some voodoo, people going out windows, stabbings, an old fashioned possession and even a ghost rape for good measure. You also not only get Linda Blair in a hilarious fright wig, but as a bonus, you get a stunt Linda Blair in an even funnier wig during a particularly physical scene!

This movie doesn’t even let up with the last frame of film! There’s the classic shock ending you’ve seen in 500 other movies, but once again it’s Laurenti’s execution that leaves you in convulsions of laughter. The combination of the way the final line is delivered with the freeze frame of the character’s brain damaged expression is frankly worth twice the price the DVD cost.

Let me put it this way: Francois Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows was the very best use of the ending freeze frame. Until the release of Witchery!

Please do yourself a favor and buy this movie. It is an essential in every collection. And you’ll feel extra awesome knowing that the Hoff is getting a royalty check of like three cents because of your excellent taste.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Just when I thought that Fulci had turned senile and was being tricked by his producers who only wanted skin and not that peculiar brand of “art” that Fulci usually brought to the table, the guy rolls off the girl when he hears her kid squawking for her in another room. He goes down to this kid’s room and stabs him with some scissors right in his little kid gut over and over!

Right away, we can see that even though the movie will be undoubtedly quite hideous, it won’t be won’t be completely devoid of its positive aspects. Bratty kid whacked? Ten cool points. Slutty mom taught a lesson? Twenty cool points. Naked guy photographed in shadow so that I don’t have to see his wiener? Priceless!

I think this must have been a dream sequence (surely a dream sequence for any guy who’s ever had his girlfriend’s snot-nosed kid interrupt some good loving with their self-centered mewling) because this little kid was alive the rest of the movie and turned out to be the instrument in the devious plot that killed this guy.

If you’re watching a Fulci movie for its gore then you better load up on the uppers, keep the lights on and make sure you don’t blink because the only gore is a short little autopsy scene where some guy is taking out the innards of the dead rich guy (Giorgio) and gives us a play by play where he talks about stuff like the colon which is kind of scary in its own way.

And when your movie hinges on some dude talking about how he found chunks of glass in some guy’s intestine, you’re simply reminding me why I’ve never watched C.S.I.

Back at the funeral, we’re enjoying a nice mixture of memorial service and flashback. As each grieving relative or mistress approaches the casket, they remember how crappy Giorgio was to them when he was alive.

Everyone that is except his daughter Rosy who was away at college and still loves her father very much and is understandably receptive when she starts hearing her father’s voice telling her that she needs to find out who killed him.

Okay, does anyone see a problem here? This guy was a jerk, his family members are greedy and homely asses, and Rosy is an airheaded moron who listens to the voices of dead people. Tell me again why I care about any of this?

The bulk of the movie is Rosy’s clumsy investigation of her daddy’s death. Rosy accuses the mistress of being the culprit, then her own mother, then figures out that someone had tricked the little boy into grinding up light bulbs and filling the ice cube trays with them and some water. Her father then had some drinks with the tainted ice cubes and this killed him when he failed to recognize that the “crushed up light bulb” taste of his drink wasn’t normal.

Rosy has a confrontation with the rest of her family and tells them that they will have to live with what they’ve done and then she leaves and goes and visits her dad’s grave and laughs heartily about everything, finally leaving the graveyard skipping merrily down the steps to the street below!

The funniest part was that the family killed the guy because they were worried that he would cut them out of his will. It turned out that he already had!

That just goes to show you that the perfect murder isn’t just about coming up with a really far-fetched scheme involving a crazy little boy who likes to grind up light bulbs. Searching through documents for wills and deeds and trusts may not be as glamorous as getting some glass in a guy’s intestines, but just as important!

Stupid beyond words in every respect, you have to think that even Fulci realized how lacking the story was (which he came up with) since he added in a useless dream sequence where Giorgio’s stepson gets attacked by zombies at his crypt. Without question, this one goes down light a light bulb laced lemonade and will leave you with blood in your stool.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Tom’s not too keen on having his studliness put on trial though and the next thing I know, this dumb broad manages to have her ample caboose break through the railing at the top of the lighthouse and is hanging there above the rocky surf with one hand, pleading with Tom to help her. While Tom stands around pondering this situation, Vi falls to her death, but I’m sure he felt bad about it.

The next morning, Tom is scanning the ocean with his binoculars when he sees a body floating. Uh-oh! Looks like that she-ghost promised on the movie poster is already doublecrossing him and is going to be floating up on shore, probably with a big note pinned to her reading “Tom Stewart is hung like a hermit crab!”

Tom realizes all this and dives in and hauls the body to shore only to discover that it was just a bunch of seaweed and that his walnut-sized brain was playing tricks on him!

About this time we meet Sandy. She’s Tom’s fiancées’ eight-year old daughter and is played by the daughter of the director. She’s not as bad as you would expect the daughter of the director to be, but I’m supposed to be seeing some dang she-ghost terrorizing this bum all over Haunted Island!

Most of the movie Sandy just kind of hangs around getting on the increasingly insane Tom’s nerves, but how many of us could really put up with some dumb kid trying to show us some lame magic trick, while we keep hearing our name being called by our dead girlfriend?

Tom sits around his island bungalow trying to practice his piano playing, but stuff keeps happening to interrupt him. Stuff like some record being mysteriously played, even after he’s taken the record off of the record player. I imagine it’s just a coincidence that the record is that kicking new tune called “Tormented” by that break-out artist, Vi!

For no real reason, we’re introduced to the blind real estate agent who doesn’t seem to do anything on the island but bring people flowers. She tells Tom that even though she really doesn’t believe in she-ghosts and stuff like that, she sees a lot of strange things in her business. Then she tells some vaguely supernatural tale about a boy and his dog that turned into ghosts and left seaweed laying around the house and peed on people’s couches or something.

She leaves and Tom gets haunted some more. Tom tries to get Meg to elope so he can get off the island, but she says no, so he says he just might go elope by himself. I know that as you’re reading this, you’re wondering how much more exciting can things get.

How does a boat captain who ferried Vi over to the island (she even managed to mention the name of her secret boyfriend to him) and is owed five bucks by her sound? Tom is new to this whole “covering up suspicious disappearance of mistress” thing, so when the sea captain comes by looking for Vi because she owes him five bucks, Tom grudgingly pays him and thinks that’s that.

Naturally, the sea captain puts together the fact that no one ever saw Vi leave the island and that Tom is getting hitched to some rich gal who isn’t Vi and he realizes that the five bucks he got can be re-negotiated into $5000!

The sea captain gets cool points because he constantly refers to Tom as “Dad” but Tom gets cool points because he takes the sea captain up to the lighthouse and is convinced by the she-ghost to whack him in the head with a lead pipe.

After he leaves with the body, Sandy comes walking down the stairs all sad and stuff. Tom went and murdered a guy and didn’t even tell her! And she thought they were best friends!

If you’ve been thinking that up until now, the she-ghost hasn’t exactly been pulling out all the stops in terrorizing Tom then you’ve got to see her when she causes Meg’s wedding dress to be ruined because there’s seaweed on it!

Or the big finish, when at the wedding she causes all the flowers to wilt and blows the pages of the Bible the priest was holding to the page about burial instead of weddings! She’s an absolute fiend! (Within her white-trash-level budget of course.)

Director Bert I. Gordon (Empire of the Ants) shoots this in about the most bland way you can imagine, using the same ugly establishing shot of a beach house about ten times during the movie. Sometimes it looks like night, sometimes it looks like sunset and sometimes it looks like it was cloudy, but Gordon was hoping it would pass for night – all in the same scene!

And the effects used to depict the hauntings make you long for William Castle’s tricks, especially when Richard Carlson is forced to hold a mannequin’s head and act scared of it.

For his part, Tom is an unsympathetic moron, and the movie can’t even decide if the she-ghost was just a product of his imagination (everyone saw her handiwork at the wedding, but no one saw anything else she did). If it wasn’t his imagination, then he really wasn’t driven insane by his guilty conscience, which renders the whole concept (at least what I thought was the concept) of the movie void.

Tormented is an apt title for this film, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s an experience about as welcome as wilted flowers, obnoxious wind, and a wad of stinky seaweed at your wedding!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In spite of Verden being one of those horror movie guys who lives in the same creepy house as his deceased wife, he kind of has the hots for this broad he meets at a fox hunt. They even take some halting steps toward a relationship in spite of his pet black cat attacking her whenever it gets the chance.

At this point, I was hoping the movie’s main terror vehicle would be more than just some jealous feline, but as it turns out not only would that be the chief form of scares in this one (there was also a dead fox, but I think that would be more smelly than scary) but that it would actually be the centerpiece of the finale when it has a death match with Vincent Price, as if the audience needed some catharsis by seeing a grown man fight it out with a house pet.

We also find out that Verden has a strange hobby of making historical treasures out of wax. This is only brought out to explain how he made a wax dummy to put in his wife’s casket, since she was still sort of dead, but not quite and wanted to live in the house with Verden.

In spite of Verden's obvious serial killer leanings, his new girlfriend immediately marries him and they have a nice honeymoon at a beach and at Stonehenge.

Before you go chiding this woman as another one of those dull-witted babes whose corset is cutting off the blood to her brain, when they come back home Verden is in the process of trying to sell the abbey. This isn’t one of those movies where there’s some spooky stuff going at the house and people just stay there for no good reason. They’re leaving as soon as their realtor can dump the thing.

Verden’s lawyer tells him that there is a bit of a snag though. It seems that no one ever bothered to file a death certificate on Ligeia when she croaked and the abbey and most of the estate is in her name, so they’ll have to dig her up, have an inquest, and determine that the cause of her death is because she was really a wax dummy.

It is at this point that you can start chiding this woman, because she stays in this stupid run down abbey even as she starts getting haunted by the wife and that darn cat!

Verden has his big showdown with the cat and there’s a laughable sequence where he’s chasing it around the room with a whip (What was that doing in the bedroom, you kinky bastard?) and culminates when he strangles the cat, revealing a supposedly shocking secret. Along the way, Verden also manages to accidentally set his haunted abbey on fire!

The movie strains itself to make it past a wafer thin eighty minutes and resorts to some lengthy opening and closing credits to pad its running time.

Nothing much in the way of explanation or motivation for anyone involved was offered up here either. What was Ligeia’s problem? Why was Verden under her spell, but no one else was? Why did the new chick marry him? Why did she put up with all the haunting? Why didn’t they take that cat to the pound?

The scares and horror in this one were non-existent unless you have a mortal fear of guys in creepy sunglasses and cats that need to be declawed. You’ll wish you had your own wax figure made up to sit through this one.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The crisis involving the washing machine doesn’t crop up until a little ways into things though. First of all, we need to set up our haunted house situation. An electronics outfit buys an old haunted country mansion, moves its research team into it, and discover that one room out of about one hundred and fifty is haunted by some gal who manifests herself in Princess Leia hologram style.

Since these blokes are men of science, they immediately see this haunting as a way to get a leg up on the Japanese in the technology race. If you had any questions as to why we’re all buying Japanese TVs, DVD players, and video games instead U.K. manufactured ones, I believe this film answers them.

Brock is the guy in charge of the project. As is the case with most really short men, he’s loud, abrasive, and generally a blustering boob, as if the sheer volume of his words will somehow make up for his genetically defective growth. He’s also prone to wearing some Earth toned slacks that are simply way too tight in the crotch area.

Since all ghost stories need a woman in them because of their valuable contributions such as their women’s intuition (it’s a bit like a dog being able to sense supernatural forces or barnyard animals spazzing out before a big storm hits), Jill is on the project.

Though many in the group can sense the ghost to varying degrees, Jill is the one most affected by it. However, Jill immediately brands herself as a bit of a flighty ditz when at the very beginning of the movie, she arrives at the mansion and somehow almost manages to get squished between two big trucks in the mansion parking lot!

So what exactly is the deal with this troublesome ghost anyway? Well, we all know that ghosts are merely the disembodied spirits of the dead who for some reason or other (usually an unsolved murder) missed the bus to the sweet hereafter and are bound and determined to make life a living hell for those of us who aren’t dead yet.

Best I could tell with this one was that she fell off some stairs and ended up being scraped off the stone floor a hundred years ago or so. Was she pushed? Did she jump? Did she fall when some guy was trying to pinch her bum? (That was Brock’s guess!)

Once Brock figures out he has a ghost in the room that was supposed to be used for data storage, he hauls a ton of scientific gear in there to take various measurements and readings. You can imagine what this entails – lots of people hunkered over teletype machines, looking at graphs, and talking about charting where “hotspots” are.

Finally, they convince themselves that they aren’t really dealing with a ghost, but an image that the room has somehow retained. Following that theory, they further assume that the image must be recorded in the stone of the room itself and the next thing you know everyone is jumping around and celebrating the fact that they have just discovered a cheap, recordable medium that could be used for storing all kinds of information!

In most movies, having your ghost be the basis for the discovery of some Flintstones version of videotape would be the lamest idea you encounter. The Stone Tape takes it to the next illogical step when Brock attempts to make the ghost appear when he wants to using a bunch of sound waves and ends up erasing it altogether! Whoops! Better hold off on that Nobel Prize!

In a plot twist that that makes everything else in the film seem perfectly logical, the room wasn’t just inhabited by one pissy spirit but by a whole succession of them. When Brock taped over the girl ghost, it acted to peel back a layer and reveal an earlier, and even scarier ghost! This was just a couple of red spots, but somehow it could drive an unbalanced woman to fall off stairs to her death!

None of what happens is very convincing, especially the part where Brock’s first thought is that he’s somehow going to market this stone as a way to store stuff. What would make you think that if a stone could somehow retain the residue of something as ethereal and unexplainable as a ghost or shade or whatever that you’ll be able to figure out how to let Aunt Blabbie store pictures of her family reunion on it?

And they mention that the stone in question is very common. Then why isn’t England overrun by these rock videotapes of spirits bitching and moaning at every opportunity?

The cast does do a nice job of trying to bring some believability to things, but can’t really compete with the lame story. Go ahead and run a magnet over this stone tape.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

For his part, Marco is one of those kids with Italian parents who is very disturbed by stuff such as witnessing the murder of his dad. He “acts out” as they say by doing little childish pranks like hiding a razor blade between piano keys so that mommy gets sliced when she’s running her hands down the keys.

He also steals and cuts up her underwear, though I’m unsure what the point of that was since he hid them. Heck, if it was me, I’d chop’em up and give ‘em right back to her! Here you go sweetheart, you can wear these around your airline pilot boyfriend, since you’re just going to be letting him in there anyway! Dad’s only been dead for seven years, you tramp!

Dora’s new husband seems to be a decent guy though. He treats Dora well, he’s got a good job that allows him to hang around stewardesses, and he’s really trying to be a good father to that little crazy panty-slicing freak Marco. He even tries to cover for the kid when Pantygate first breaks out!

Marco is pretty much out of control most of the time, tormenting his mother and doing crazy stuff like lying down in the basement near a mysteriously bricked up wall. He’s really cold and is kind of playing dead and his mother gets him upstairs and into bed and then he pops right up and tells her that he was only fooling and runs out to go play on his swing.

Marco also seems to get himself a bunch of psychic powers (and later he even gets his very own set of Exorcist brand contact lenses!) and this leads him to do stuff like causing shutters to slam shut and the stunt where he taped a picture of Bruno’s head to a swing and swung it back and forth. While this was going on, Bruno was in the middle of a flight and the plane was experiencing mechanical difficulty and trying to crash. Dora comes out and interrupts Marco’s murderous plan by stopping the swing. For some reason Marco never uses his “voodoo-swing” super powers again.

Bruno begins drugging Dora and though it isn’t made clear what he’s up to, I assume that it is some kind of sedative because she is such a spaz. I don’t think he has any reason to complain though – he knew she was in the nut hut and had to have shock therapy when they met.

Dora finally gets fed up with Marco’s behavior and takes him to see the psychiatrist she has on retainer. He doesn’t specialize in children or anything, but this is the same guy that treated Dora for her breakdown once her husband croaked. He has Marco draw some pictures, but Marco doublecrosses them by drawing the pictures of a well adjusted kid!

Dora gets haunted by her dead husband toward the end of the film and he pops up to keep the audience awake (like Dora’s constant screeching would let anyone get the shuteye this movie eventually deserves) and soon she’s down in the basement to confront Bruno who is busily busting down a wall. A box cutter and pick axe liven their conversation up a bit.

Mario Bava’s final film is a half-baked mish-mash of the possession genre, the woman on the brink of madness genre, and the Damien Thorne genre. The result is this wildly uneven thing that careens back and forth with the kid being crazy, the kid being possessed, the mother being crazy and seeing things, the new husband sneaking around and plotting while none of it really makes any sense.

The dead husband’s ghost is apparently trying to get revenge on the mother, but he does a muddled job with it. Sometimes messing around with Bruno, sometimes with Dora, sometimes through Marco, and sometimes in her dreams. After awhile, it all just seemed like a random series of events designed to goose the viewer every so often.

Razor blading the piano, cutting up her undies, and slamming the shutter? Why bother? What’s the point? Just to taunt and play with her mind? Fine, then get on with it and plunge her into madness, but sometimes she gets plunged and then in the next scene she’s okay, and then she gets plunged again and it becomes obnoxiously repetitive.

As this was a Mario Bava film (in spite of him tricking his kid Lamberto to shoot some of it) you’re let down by the lack of any of his signature style. No trademark use of colors or lighting. No atmosphere, other than the whole “Amityville Horror haunted house in the seventies” motif that is workmanlike at best and TV movie bland at worst.

There’s some pretty violent episodes, some jarring and effective, but those scenes are the exception. By hewing too closely to the films he tried to copy, Bava sacrifices putting his own distinctive stamp on things all in an effort to cash in on the latest fad. Not truly awful, but maddening for what it might have been if it wasn’t so concerned with referencing other, better movies.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Dr. Arrowsmith is halfway to the Mad Scientist Convention when he realizes that he left his paper, “On the Benefits of a Young Virgin’s Blood For Rejuvenating Beauty-Impaired Hags,” in his greenhouse. He gets an eyeful when he runs into his wife and the gardener and he can’t tell where she ends and he begins.

Mad Scientist quickly becomes Insanely Jealous Mad Scientist! Next stop for these two faithless dogs is the secret torture room that the doc keeps on standby for just such an event.

Later, we see the doctor at work in his secret lab where he drains out some of their blood and I guess we were supposed to understand that his girlfriend would be using it to stop the aging process.

At this point during the movie, I had lined out two horror gimmicks the movie was going to be using: murdered lover’s ghosts taking revenge on their killer and blood used to revive someone’s decaying looks. But that wasn’t all that was going to be happening. In spite of the terminal boredom you’ll experience upon viewing Nightmare Castle, several different story elements are trotted out in an effort to get things moving. And none of it works.

When Arrowsmith’s wife was being tortured she pulled the old laughing in his face bit about his inheritance. She had a sneaking suspicion that he would react unfavorably to her heating up the greenhouse with the help, so she changed her will so that her crazy sister would get everything in the event of her torture-related death!

Dr. Arrowsmith hears this and immediately formulates a foolproof (with emphasis on fool) plan to get his hands on the inheritance anyway.

This is where the movie finally comes in with its “torment the crazy wife into going more crazy” element that the movie had been promising. The doctor’s plan seemed to be full of, um, optimism, as it were. You see, I think it was pretty optimistic of him to think that no one would ever ask him what happened to his wife and the gardener with the rippling abs.

It was also optimistic of him to think that he could just roll on up to the asylum where the crazy sister (Barbara Steele who also played the other sister) was staying and immediately marry her (“I don’t know what happened to your sister. Do you want to marry me?”), even though they didn’t know each other and she was so crazy that she needed to be locked up.

Once he got married to the crazy broad his plan was to either kill her or drive her even more crazy so that the titular castle would be his to share with his old, nasty girlfriend.

Doesn’t anyone think that it would be suspicious that this dude was married to first one sister, than another and somehow these two young women would just up and die leaving him with all the goodies?

Initially the doctor and his honey try to drug the new wife to drive her crazy, but there’s a screw up and they don’t get her drugged. Luckily, she’s crazy anyway and starts seeing and hearing things. Unluckily, she’s hearing and seeing the murders of her sister and her lover!

In a fit of abject stupidity, Dr. Arrowsmith calls in a doctor to hang out and look after his new wife. This new doctor soon becomes a thorn in everyone’s side when he starts to believe everything that this crazy chick is telling him!

This leads to the single funny scene in the movie where Arrowsmith rigs up a bathtub to electrocute the doctor by running wires out second story windows and into windows on the ground floor. Then he sits in an adjoining room waiting to hear the dude get into the tub so that he can throw the switch. Well, he hears someone mucking around in the tub and throws the switch, but somehow it’s the butler that ends up fried!

Director Mario Caiano (Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules) tried everything in this one and failed over and over. All the various plot points were ill-conceived, boring, or just plain didn’t make any sense.

The worst part of all this was the villain, Dr. Arrowsmith. He never seemed to really care one way or another about anything that happened (frying the butler simply elicited one of those shoulder shrugging looks) and he didn’t seem that bent on getting rid of the new wife very fast.

I also didn’t understand the relationship that he and his girlfriend had. Why were they together? What exactly was her problem with needing blood to stop her aging? Why didn’t she just use Oil of Olay?

Nightmare Castle is such a bad dream that even the vengeful ghosts could barely be roused to show interest most of the the time!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Normally, you’d just write a potty-mouthed wino off as just such filler and atmosphere, but there’s an important reason why he’s turned to the bottle and hangs around outside the haunted castle cussing out the wimpy parapsychologist in the area to perform some psychic surgery on the castle’s owner.

As expected though from a film with an insanely boring story about a vengeful ghost who seems vengeful only when someone is snooping around, I never quite got what this guy’s problem was, but since he had an unnatural attachment to a child’s doll I knew that something extra spooky was happening here!

And while that doll would get a decent amount of spooky scenes (it even got its head run over in a traumatic yet ultimately pointless flashback!), director Leandro Lucchetti’s utter lack for the feel of how a film should be constructed, what story elements are important, and just generally knowing where to point the camera are perhaps the spookiest aspects of Bloody Psycho!

It is while Dr. Werner Vogler is at the castle to hover his hands over the half-paralyzed body of the lady owner that he gets mixed up in a mixed up ghost story. The lady’s mother was mysteriously killed years ago, something also happened to her son-in-law that she may have been having an affair with and her granddaughter ran away after she was killed. The lady herself was paralyzed in a car accident which was barely referenced. I guess when you have a life like that some events are bound to get lost in the shuffle.

In addition to being a psychic surgeon, Dr. Werner Vogler also has a touch of ESP. This allows him to have visions of events that have already occurred, which give him clues about the strange happenings at the castle.

As he so unhelpfully explains, when he was young he was cautious, but once he got older he really developed his extrasensory perception. And since his visions usually involve stabbing and a rotting corpse in a wheelchair, we’re damn glad he did!

The film details Vogler’s efforts to unravel what happened and is generally quite boring with scenes of him talking to a priest, talking to the family lawyer, buying the doll off the bum, and doing some shirtless Tai-Chi in his bedroom after a grueling day of faith healing.

Further hobbling Bloody Psycho is Lucchetti’s seemingly inattentive or random choice of editing. When Vogler meets up with the granddaughter (she ran away to the horse training school down the street), we get a lingering shot of her heading out on a trail ride accompanied by western-themed cow poke music which would normally be obnoxiously out of place with the rest of the movie except that it provides a welcome respite from the droning stock horror music that fills the rest of the film.

There’s also the scene where Vogler and a reporter are walking and the camera inexplicably focuses on the ground which is strewn with trash. So it is that we find ourselves in the midst of a ghost story while looking at a shattered television and a broken toilet! It’s like this movie was shot in the backyard of some guy living in Missouri!

Luchhetti didn’t make five movies you’ve never heard of (including AIDS – Web of Silence) without knowing how to deliver where it counts though. Of course I’m talking about implied lesbianism!

While feminists will undoubtedly be outraged when the maid is ordered by the lady of the castle to get down on her knees and clean up a broken dish and is also called a whore, male viewers recognize that this is just simply a super hot part of an broad-on-broad relationship! Besides, they end up snuggling in bed later, so it was all in good lesbo fun, right?

And don’t think Dr. Vogler is going to let himself be left out of the tacky sexcapeds (the milk feeding and slurping scene if not exactly tacky, is at least quite sticky) that fill the days of the castle in between gruesome killings! He screws the runaway granddaughter who moves into the castle with him shortly after dumping a table full of beer on him at local cafe! Waiter, I’ll have what they’re having!

But it is the murders where Bloody Psycho really shines with its memorably underwhelming use of a wheelchair-bound rotting corpse. I know what you’re thinking. What’s this thing going to do? Run over my neck with its wheelchair? That’s exactly what’s it’s going to do! But only after dramatically crashing through the same rickety window about five times!

There are of course a few other murders though I wasn’t sure why those responsible felt threatened, especially considering that the film ended in such a way that the same thing could have been accomplished about 80 minutes sooner than that. And for all his psychic superpowers, Vogler only succeeded in putting himself in danger again and again.

Bloody Psycho was one of five films (the others being The Murder Secret, Massacre, Escape From Death, and Hansel & Gretel) Lucio Fulci was involved with that he took footage from to make his Cat in the Brain. Whatever its distinctly turd-like properties then, Bloody Psycho can be praised knowing that it was the bad horror movie equivalent of an organ donor!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Director Mario Bava (Baron Blood, I vampiri) uses all his technical prowess behind the camera to prop up this mostly dull revenge tale of a supernatural tot forcing superstitious dummies into impaling themselves on spikes and cutting their own throats.

Spooky village sets are impressively lit, the camera swoops and swirls here and there in impressive fashion, and our squared jawed hero even ends up chasing himself repeatedly through the same room again and again for reasons that a spectral brat could only understand!

Dr. Paul Eswai’s nightmarish encounter with his equally hunky double only served to illustrate his genius as the guy investigating the mysterious deaths in the village.

Despite spending all of the film decrying the villager’s superstitious beliefs and being outraged at the bizarre home remedies provided by the local witch which they all favored over his fancy pants modern day medicine (which seemed to consist of him placing a wet rag on a chick’s head), Dr. Eswai has to have his ass saved by the local witch a couple of times, doesn’t debunk anything at all, but yet walks away with the only hot broad in the whole village! The benefits of a college education are obvious indeed!

Dr. Eswai is called to the village by his friend Inspector Kruger to help get to the bottom of things. His first task is to perform an autopsy on a gal who fell onto some sharp spikes. I wasn’t sure how the autopsy would dispel whether she accidentally fell, was pushed, or as was forced by a ghost to jump on them, but it allowed Dr. Eswai to meet the luscious Monica so Dr. Eswai clearly knew what he was doing!

Monica is a gal who used to live in the village, went away to school and then came back just in time to witness an autopsy.

Monica turns out to have a secret connection to the crazed baroness/medium who is also the mother of the dead child at the wormy center of this poop sandwich of a town crisis.

Monica’s relationship with the baroness and her return to town just in the nick of time to provide a sexy damsel in distress is so convenient for the story that it’s one of the spookiest elements of the film!

Even spookier though is Dr. Eswai’s hair! It maintains such an immovable, glazed look throughout the proceedings that it proves to be a sturdier hero than the largely ineffective Dr. Eswai himself! It’s also smartly colored with an oragnish hue that goes quite well with Dr. Eswai’s fashion don’t burnt umber suit!

It’s easy to run Dr. Eswai down though for his utter lack of involvement in successfully bringing the mystery to a successful conclusion, but really, isn’t he just a glorified coroner here? Can we really expect everyone to live up to legendary TV coroner Quincy, M.E.?

After all, it wasn’t like things didn’t get wrapped up, right? Once the medium unleashed her ghost on the town witch’s boyfriend, this caused an occult powered catfight between the two that ultimately settled everything.

And Dr. Eswai still ended up with Monica. And his hair still looked super suave. I’m pretty sure Quincy would’ve taken that result any day of the week!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

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 “yes!” 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.

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 Beyond Darkness (titles may vary depending on where you live), one of which manages to feature both David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair!

© 2009 MonsterHunter