Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Starring Lara Wendel, Greg Scott, Mary Sellers and Donald O'Brien
If you're ever in the mood for a change of pace with your horror-watching, go to Italy. Italian horror movies have their own unique flavor with several of my favorite aspects of low-budget cinema: The acting is almost uniformly terrible, stuff very seldom makes sense, and buckets of fake blood. If this sounds like fun to you, you're in the right place. If you're in the mood for high quality, you're ALSO in the right place, as some of the best horror directors around are all about having names with plenty of vowels. Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, get any DVD with those names attached and you're in for a good time.
Ghosthouse is definitely another movie in this vein. Directed by Umberto Lenzi, a guy who has made literally dozens of other exploitation films and shows absolutely no qualms here about slathering on the red stuff, this is one of the many unofficial sequels to the Sam Raimi Evil Dead franchise that I'm not a particularly big fan of. Basically, they took the first two ED films, renamed them La Casa 1 and 2, and then took several more films that kinda-sorta shared the "badass ghosts in a remote location" theme and made them part of the same series in Italy. Thus, if you find this movie in Europe, it's known as La Casa 3. Why? Who knows, but I don't pretend to know the mysteries of the universe. What I DO know is that this movie, while not particularly GOOD in the traditional sense, was a fun experience that I actually liked BETTER than those other movies starring that dude with the big chin. Blasphemy, I know. On with the show.
So, longtime students of the blog, how do a lot of horror movies begin? That's right, with a Past Evil, and that's what we get with Ghosthouse. Admittedly, it's also a damn good one, as we get a creepy little girl named Henrietta (played by Kristen Fougerousse, and while she doesn't speak much, her presence is the thing that you'll definitely remember about this movie) who is (a) obsessed with her scary clown doll, and (b) has just murdered the family cat. After her dad locks her in the basement, we get further spookiness as Henrietta uses the otherworldly powers of the doll to murder her father as well, and it's shown in all of its tomato-sauced glory. Five minutes in, two bloody deaths. All in all, the scorecard is getting filled in nicely.
Smash forward twenty years to the present day of 1988, where we meet our two main characters - Martha (Lara Wendel) and her boyfriend Paul (Greg Scott). To be fair, these two aren't exactly Sir Laurence Olivier-level thespians, and that's putting it nicely. Wendel in particular is damn near unwatchable at points, but I don't think many people look to Italian horror cinema to see deep Strasburg method acting. What you need to know is that they're a couple, they have sex, and Paul is really into ham radio. Yeah, ham radio. Remember that stuff? It's this contraption that leads them to a mysterious replaying of the same soul-destroying song that played over the prologue kills (which I just realized that I forgot to mention - yeah, every time Henrietta and her doll are around, this eerie kids' song plays in the background), which means that it's off to find the source of it. Truly Paul Schrader-esque scripting at work here.
This movie definitely has its fair share of pointless characters. I'll start with...Pepe. On their way to the ghost house, Paul and Martha pick up this annoying hitch-hiker who likes to play weird jokes and has a borderline sexual eating fixation. He's one of the most annoying side characters you'll ever see, made all the more amazing by the fact that he's in the movie for virtually NO REASON. The same can be said for the three weird squatter people who are ON VACATION at the abandoned house when Paul and Martha get there. Yeah. On vacation. At a run-down house where murders took place. I like to sit at home and play video games, but whatever floats your boat, bros. Then there's Susan, played by the certifiably hot Mary Sellers who serves as the token eye candy and is the recipient of the movie's death scene. Who are these people? Who cares. They're here to get killed. Fortunately, that's an area where Ghosthouse excels.
For anyone who has seen Dario Argento's masterpiece Suspiria, you know that horror that doesn't quite make sense is that much scarier. This is the approach that Umberto Lenzi takes with this movie. Every time that kiddie song pops up on the soundtrack, we know that someone is either getting wrecked in a gruesome way or there's going to be some nonsensical event happen that is never explained. For an indication of some of the latter, this movie contains a murderous groundskeeper whose motives (I think) are never explained. Yup. He chases people around with a meat cleaver. Why? Who knows. There's also disappearing ghost dogs and police who conspicuously don't mind that all of Scooby's gang is hanging out in a van near an abandoned house looking for ghosts. That is what you call script convenience. Really, though, none of this stuff even matters, because every time that Henrietta shows up, this flick is ACES.
Make no mistake, this is Henrietta's movie. Again, her motives are never truly explained; we learned in the prologue that her dad, the local mortician, stole the clown doll from someone who was buried in the cemetery. The implication is that evil spirits possess the doll and also Henrietta. But that stare...man, that ungodly stare that Henrietta has. Henrietta's presence is just one of those things that instantly gets under your skin every time she pops up on camera, and f**k me if science can explain it. So even when the movie is having its characters do very DUMB THINGS (like taking vacations in abandoned houses, random showering in said abandoned house, refusing to leave after multiple people turn up dead, etc.), we can forgive it because this villain is legitimately scary and the payoff scenes are shot so well.
There are movies with great concepts that have terrible execution. The Will Smith film Hancock comes immediately to mind. Movies like Ghosthouse are a rarer breed, films with questionable material and shitty writing but boasting all the atmosphere and raw, guttural power to creep you out that you could ever ask for. That's all you can ask for out of a horror film - to be scared, weirded out, or occasionally repulsed. Any one of these is just fine on its own; all three is like a 50-point achievement. Also, the ending is unintentionally hilarious...so much so that I won't spoil it for a change.
*** out of ****. If you go into this one NOT expecting highbrow entertainment, you won't be disappointed. It's definitely worth a watch if you're into Italian horror and still worth checking out if you're not a mutant like me.
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