21st August 2016, 10:25 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
GHOSTHOUSE – Italian horror movies are renowned for ripping off anything with box office potential and a pulse, but what is the inspiration behind Umberto Lenzi's 'Ghosthouse'? Some might suggest that it's a typically clumsy attempt to knock together bits of 'Poltergeist', 'Amityville', maybe even Fulci's own 'House by the Cemetery'. But from where I'm sitting, the influence of the infinitely creepier UK TV Testcard is more in evidence. Maybe I'm stretching things a bit, but there's definitely a sinister little girl and a clown doll in it, and, in what has to be a deliberate act of homage, they do at one point appear on a TV screen. A hack like Lenzi couldn't be expected to mine the depths of such satanic potential, but maybe he doesn't have to. Dolls, particularly clown dolls, are just freaky anyway. Anyway, going back to the theme of 'stretching things a bit', we have the plot of 'Ghosthouse' to consider. It involves a radio enthusiast who picks up an SOS message which, it turns out, happens to come from the house with the sinister child / doll combo in it. Not only that – the message came from the future! How? Why? Haven't you ever heard of telepathy, or something? I think a character actually says that at one point. Or he might have used the word 'telekinisis' instead, but he definitely didn't say “some things happen for reasons of pure plot device only, biatch”. Anyway, we're introduced to various people who serve little purpose other than as fodder for death scenes, as exemplified by the presence of an annoying hitchhiker who fills his three minutes of screen time with weirdly pointless practical jokes before being iced off screen (his dying form appears in a doorway near the end, by which point I imagine the viewer will haveforgotten he was ever even in it). 'Ghosthouse' doesn't do badly in terms of cheap gore, but makes the mistake of laying down its strongest hand right at the beginning, with a pretty bloody double murder which has a distinctly Fulci-esque vibe to it. Apart from this kind of thing, the main attraction, as with most Italian horror rips, is the ad hoc bizarreness. There's quite a bit of it, enough to carry the audience through the many sequences marked 'has light doze potential'. When they're not yapping (endlessly), people fall into vats of milky acid, flail around in rooms full of feathers and toys, are menaced by maggot-faced apparitions. There's a creepy nursery rhyme which appears to be played by the doll, and a completely bizarre shot of a rocking horse partially blocking the view of someone who's been cut in half. All kind of non-sequitors, but all necessary in a carnivalesque sort of way. The acting is as wooden as hell, particularly a dude who looks like a young Steve Coogan (he's the guy who died in the future or something). For those who want quality thesps, Dr Butcher himself Don O'Brian is at hand, mugging his way through the film as a sort of inconsequential slasher killer. This all adds to the creeping atmosphere of unreality conjured by 'Ghosthouse'. That's 'unreality' as in simply fake, by the way. There's nothing by way of scares, suspense, or 'real horror', whatever that is. But anyone interested in watching 'Ghosthouse' will know that anyway, and will just get off on the synthetic weirdness of it all. Another one where the otherwise sorry looking Vipco release has a suspiciously good pq.
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