House by the Cemetery (1981)

1981
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza and Silvia Collatina

The ol' Lick Ness Monster blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years.  It wasn't always like it is today, which is...pretty much a complete f**kin' mess, where I alternate between reviewing pretty much any movie I feel like, occasional top five lists and the even rarer horror nerd op-ed piece.  WAY back when this thing started, I actually had a focus, and my whole goal was to introduce people to only the best horror movies.  Or at least what I considered the best, because I highly doubt that any hoity-toity film critic out there would include Maximum Overdrive on such a list.  Well, I was just looking through that list of 50 International Horror Registry (seriously, that's what I called it - what the hell was I thinking?) inductions, and one movie conspicuous by its absence was the one in question today.  I'm looking forward to typing this one up, because I consider House by the Cemetery to be one of the SCARIEST movies ever made.

Released in 1981 and featuring a whole lotta actors with a whole lotta vowels in their names (it's Italian), House by the Cemetery is one of those flicks that initially didn't get much love from critics but has since come to be known as a classic.  And it was directed by Lucio Fulci.  Odds are that most of you younger teeny-boppers reading this probably don't know that name.  Up until a few years ago, I'd never seen any of the dude's movies.  But even before I checked out any of his flicks, I knew more than a few people who just SWORE by his work.  While I'm still not a superfan or anything (just due to personal preference), there's no doubt that this guy left a huge mark on horror history with his "Gates of Hell" trilogy, a series of three totally un-related movies that are almost completely devoid of coherent plots but feature a bunch of fake blood, nasty kills, vanishing zombies and all other sorts of debauchery.  This is actually the third movie in the trilogy, following City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, but it requires no knowledge of the other films.  Enough talk.  On with the show.

Horror movies with a prologue kill always gain +2 Fonzie cool points in my book, and Fulci delivers the goods with a sequence pretty much ripped straight out of my nightmares.  I've always been scared of abandoned houses, and what we see here is a young woman going through a creepy house in search of her boyfriend.  Well, she finds him, complete with scissors lodged in his throat, before being brutally stabbed and dragged into a cellar.  As solid of an attention-grabber as you'll ever find, and we're only two minutes into the running time.

I'll be the first person to admit that this flick has a lot of characters.  Probably too many.  But the main story of the film is the following: a short time later, a family moves into the same house where Prologue Kill occurred.  There's a researcher/scientist type guy named Norman, his wife Lucy, and their young son Bob.  To be perfectly honest, the parents are pretty drab and uninteresting, but the character that I really want to talk about is Bob.  "Bob."  It's kind of an odd name for a kid in a horror movie, but nonetheless Bob is the character that you'll remember as this movie goes on.  See, kids, back in the day horror films used to NOT be shy about putting kids in mortal danger.  Sometimes, they would even kill them off.  What this movie does with Bob is nothing short of torturous, and it's to be commended, because running this poor kid through the gauntlet is what gives this movie almost all of its power to scare the bejesus out of you.  He's played by Giovanni Frezza, and he manages to not get too annoying, an amazing feat in and of itself for a movie like this.

To be sure, almost all of the movie's scariest moments involve Bob.  It immediately becomes clear that the actual PLOT of this movie is inconsequential.  It turns out that Norman's former colleague was the previous owner of the house and murdered his mistress before offing himself.  Norman is there to look into the history of the house and find out why this happened.  And Lucy is just kind of...there.  I can't fault the actors here for their lack of characterization; it's exactly the way that it was written in the script.  In between that basic framework of a mystery story, we're given a whole side cast of potential victims including a slimy realtor (played by Dagmar Lassander of Devil Fish relative fame for anyone familiar with MST3K) and Bob's hapless babysitter.  Both of whom, at different points, find themselves going into the basement of the house only to be brutally killed - the latter of whom is discovered by Bob, followed by this soul-destroying camera shot of him running up the steps in slow motion.  Kids...stick with The Wizard of Oz.  If I'd seen this as a child, it would have TRAUMATIZED me.

This leads to the movie's money sequence of tension and discovery, as Bob debates whether or not to go back into the basement.  Well, he does, only to get locked in.  Jesus.  The parents bust the door down and find him restrained by a pair of slimy zombie hands and hack it off...and then the script gives us our answers, as it turns out that the thing killing everybody in the basement is actually a rotting living corpse named Jacob Freudstein (clever - see, it combines Freud and Frankenstein) who has figured out a way to stay alive indefinitely by absorbing the blood of his victims.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  That said, the movie then throws its climax our way, complete with a slightly ambiguous ending that is nothing if not a complete and utter bummer.  It doesn't make much sense, but that's nothing new.  Traditionally, Lucio Fulci movies don't make much sense in traditional terms, but that's just the way I like it.

If I haven't made it clear already, I consider House by the Cemetery to be a really scary movie.  The Thing in the Basement is something that every kid can relate to, and this movie takes that concept and amps up the weirdness to the nth degree.  The kill scenes are shown in their total glory, complete with awesome makeup FX work on both the murder scenes and on Dr. Freudstein himself.  I DO have to also report, though, that there are long stretches of the movie that kind of drag.  The mystery aspect of the plot involving Norman searching the grounds, finding various tombstones around the property, and meeting former colleagues and important professor-type people are all pretty much terminally boring.  Thankfully, they're brief, and we quickly get back to the blood and murder taking place in the basement. 

I always go back to that when it comes to this movie.  It's a movie about a monster in the basement, and it's revealed to you slowly, with eerie dark shots and almost no clue as to what it actually is for much of the running time.  Folks, that's what scary stories are all about.  It's beauty in simplicity, and when you've got a director like Lucio Fulci who can get the absolute most out of every dollar of budget, that simplicity can be scary as f**k.  This isn't one to watch at night.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Rating time.  This flick gets a solid *** 1/2 out of ****, and the added award that it's easily one of the ten most frightening movies I've ever seen.  Maybe I'll get to the other movies in the Gates of Hell series soon.  And that is what they refer to in the business as a "teaser."