[HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY screens Friday October 9th at 11:30 pm at the Nightlight Cinema.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
Trying
to explain my love for Lucio Fulci's early 1980s horror films to any
rational person is a losing proposition. I realize I'm defending the
indefensible, and my attempts to explain away the director's trademark
incoherence as “nightmare logic” have the ring of desperate
rationalization to them, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Even by Fulci's loose standards, though, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
is especially shoddy work. Like most Italian movies made from the
sixties through the eighties that weren't directed by Fellini or
Antonioni, this is nothing more than a cheap attempt to cash in on the
popularity of another film or genre. In this case its something in the
ballpark of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR meets THE SHINING,
only with considerably more gore and considerably less artistry than
Kubrick's film. Hell, it even makes Stuart Rosenberg's workmanlike
direction on AMITYVILE look good.
But
here's the thing. If there's one area that Fulci always excelled in
when directing horror, it was atmosphere. Well, that and gratuitous
gore, but anyone can pull off a gross-out with enough fake blood and
entrails. Fulci had a knack for creating a real sense of supernatural
dread in his films that goes a long way towards making up for his
incomprehensible plots, at least if you're a horror junkie looking for a
fix. And despite the utter stupidity of this film, it still has that
atmosphere, and that's enough for me to give it a pass.
Trying
to write a plot synopsis of this film is no easy task, but essentially a
New York professor (Paolo Marco), his wife (Catriona MacColl) and their
son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) move into a New England house that used to
belong to one Dr. Freudstein so that the professor can work on a
research paper about suicides. Lots of weird stuff happens involving
decapitated mannequins, ghost girls, the possibility that the professor
has been here before, and the fact that Dr. Freudstein's grave appears
to be in the dining room floor. Will the family wise up in time and get
out, or will they fall prey to the vengeful undead?
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