Ghosthouse/Witchery (1988)

JUNE 28, 2015

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

The only thing Italian horror producers did better than rip off American genre movies was shamelessly rename the movies to make them look like sequels to unrelated properties, either for their own distribution or when sending them elsewhere. Sometimes they were their own productions, such as Beyond The Door (a film that got a "sequel" in Shock) and other times they'd piggyback on American franchises. For example, the Evil Dead series was renamed La Casa* over there, and after Evil Dead 2/La Casa 2 was an even bigger draw there than in its native US, they saw fit to continue the series with at least three "sequels", including Ghosthouse (aka La Casa 3) and Witchery (aka La Casa 4, and also Witchcraft, not to be confused with the long-running DTV series). These two are making their blu-ray debut this week, and if it's successful enough maybe Scream Factory can bring us La Casa 5, better (?) known as Beyond Darkness. (UPDATE! I wrote this review all week - see last paragraph for reasons - and a day after I wrote that part Scream indeed announced that the film will be released later this year)

Interestingly, unlike all those demon-less Demons sequels (or the infamous Troll 2), these movies are at least thematically similar to the Evil Dead films - one of them even involves a tape recording! Both involve a bunch of folks meeting up at a creepy place, and in both the evil force wipes out pretty much everyone in a variety of ways. They might lack the energy and creativity of Raimi's films, but if this was 1988 or 1989 and the internet didn't exist to quickly inform me that I was watching something completely unrelated, I'd be... well, not fooled, but at least not as angry as I was when I was 14, buying a movie I was led to believe was a sequel to Dawn of the Dead and seeing some voodoo zombie stuff (that would be Fulci's Zombie - I've since come around). Compared to most of these retitled things, these movies are Saw-level tight with Evil Dead.

Not sure which one I prefer of the two; they're both pretty entertaining, and what could have been a Massachusetts bias in favor of Ghosthouse turned out to be a moot point - Witchery was set there too! They even share a police car from Scituate, which is the (real) seaside town where the films were shot, another thing that makes this fake series almost plausibly connected (they beat Marvel to the punch by like 20 years!). I guess in that regard Ghosthouse would get the edge because it has a few scenes in Boston proper (including a bit at Faneuil Hall), but either way it was a nice surprise - MA-shot films are pretty rare, so I certainly wasn't expecting to see my old neighborhood in a random Italian flick, let alone in two of them.

Ghosthouse also lacks David Hasselhoff. It's not Witchery's fault that he became such a joke, but it was nearly impossible for me to watch it without thinking of the reality show mainstay that is synonymous with "lazy stunt casting" nowadays. In 1988 he was still the handsome hero of a recently ended long-running series (Knight Rider), so it'd be the equivalent of getting someone like Jeff Donovan from Burn Notice today - hardly something to laugh at, and probably helped the movie get sold (whereas now it'd probably be a red flag). He's actually not bad as a photographer who ends up getting trapped in the seaside hotel with his wife, some prospective buyers, and a really bad child actor, but every 5 minutes I'd just get a Baywatch image in my head, or worse, the bloated dude eating a cheeseburger off the floor. Linda Blair is the movie's other big star and thankfully she doesn't have that notoriety - she may always be "the girl from Exorcist" but she never really tainted her brand the way her co-star has. She also gets possessed briefly in the 3rd act, which was a surprise - I figured she'd rather avoid the obvious comparison and skip roles that required such behavior (not counting Repossessed, of course).

The location goes a long way to making up for Hoffstraction, however. I've always been intrigued by big hotels set right on the water; we used to go to Maine in the summer and I knew from the odd trip to check on our trailer (it was one of those family campgrounds - we'd leave our big ass trailer there all year round even though the campground was only open from Memorial Day to Labor Day) that the area was pretty much a ghost town in the off season, so I'd be curious about those giant hotels that had to be completely empty for months on end (my early viewing of The Shining probably informed some of this). But such locales are rarely used in horror films; sadly, Puppet Master is the only other one that readily comes to mind. Unfortunately they don't get too much use of it, holing up in a couple of distinct rooms and limiting the exploration to a few scenes (I think we see more in the mostly horror-free early "tour" we get of the place than we do once the shit hits the fan), but it still makes for an interesting setting. There's a great bit where the witch/ghost thing traps them all inside and shuts all the lights off as a would-be rescue chopper flies overhead - allowing you to see the hotel in all its glory as their searchlight scans all of the windows.

Plus it's about a witch! Maybe I just pick wrong, but it seems the Italians were afraid of being compared to Argento and thus left most of the witching to him, while they tackled zombies and black-gloved killers, plus the odd supernatural silliness (director Fabrizio Laurenti's next film was the incredible killer tree movie Contamination .7, which, sigh, is also known as Troll 3). But not here, it's a legit witch witch carrying out witch-y type killings like crucifying someone and roasting them on an upside down cross (the devil also pops up for good measure). It doesn't make a hell of a lot of conventional sense, but it's tough to pick out the obvious survivor from their introductions, offers some decent gore and various kills, and offers one of the more abrupt attempts at an epilogue I've ever seen (seriously, it's like 12 seconds long and hilariously blunt). And the old bitchy lady gets killed early - I've gotten used to the "let's keep the asshole around so we can build up to a spectacular death!" way of thinking, so it's nice to see a movie that opts to get rid of its unlikable character early and keep only the sympathetic ones around for a while.

As for Ghosthouse, the characters aren't as diverse - buncha twenty-somethings, including two blond guys I had trouble telling apart, leading to some confusion (luckily, one of them is killed off early). But the story, involving a little ghost girl who terrorizes them in typical haunted house ways (including a pretty great bit where the floor breaks apart and a guy nearly drowns in milk), plus a deranged handyman killing people for trespassing for good measure, makes up for the bland protagonists. It also has one of my favorite "doctor explains a death" scenes in movie history, where he tells the cop that a corpse couldn't have been killed by another person due to the angle of the cut on their neck, and thus it HAD to be a piece of the fan breaking off and flying into the guy via centrifugal force (he explains this kind of casually, as if it happens often).

But the real draw is the very odd hitchhiker that our heroes pick up and get rid of on the way to the house. He's pretty delightful for a hitchhiker, probably because he doesn't know how to do it properly - he stands in the middle of the road, for one thing, and later he risks the hero's life by trying to scare him with a skeleton arm thing while he's driving. They get rid of him not long after that, but he returns later, scaring a different character with the same prop before entering the haunted house, scoffing at a bag of cookies in favor of a box of croutons (?), and then gets killed not long after that. His scenes are so disconnected that you'd swear he was added into the narrative after test screenings, but the girl he scared on his second appearance talks about him later, which seems like a detail that they'd skip if it was a late addition (her description is amazing too; her friend doubts she really saw anyone and she's like "He had a skeleton arm!" without explaining it was a toy). I could have watched a whole movie about this guy just goofing off on the fringes of a more exciting storyline.

This fella aside, one thing I liked about the movie is how it split the two groups of protagonists up, letting two of them go back to the city to take the brunt of the less exciting plot development scenes while the rest of the characters wandered around at the house, often getting killed. If everyone stayed together you'd get the long exposition dumps, plus narrative hiccups where people would be getting killed two rooms away from someone sitting there reading an old newspaper or whatever, oblivious to the screaming. I know conventional logic is that a movie is scarier if you get the sense that they are kinda stuck there (like, well, Evil Dead!), and it DOES spoil the mood a bit when the hero goes back to his riverside office in Boston at the halfway point, but again - it keeps it stopping completely cold to deliver pages of backstory at once. And that means we're never too far from hearing the creepy-ass "theme" that accompanies the evil spirit - it sounds like a simple saying being played backwards, over and over along with equally unsettling music. The jump scares and such aren't particularly great here, but that music more than makes up for it (the clown doll is also appropriately "off" - much better than the one in Fauxltergeist). It's rare to enjoy a film for being goofy AND somewhat creepy, so kudos to Umberto Lenzi for pulling it off, even if it wasn't intentional.

Lenzi's usual hatred of "things that make sense" still comes through, however. In addition to characters getting angry over nothing (and forgetting about it a few seconds later), he offers a particularly head-slapping bit where a cop talks on his squad car's CB radio. A common enough scene, but Lenzi inexplicably chose not to include the other side of the conversation, so the cop is sitting there with a two way handset, responding to an unheard voice with things like "When?" and "OK, I'll check that out!" or whatever, as if he was on a phone instead of a device where we should be able to hear the other person speaking. Lenzi has always been one of the more random of this group (which includes Fulci, Lamberto Bava, Claudio Fragrasso, etc.), and you'll be happy to know that this fits in nicely with his others in that respect.

All in all, a perfectly enjoyable double feature of a couple of movies that flew under the radar. By the late 80s, the Italian horror scene was starting to dry up, as they couldn't compete with the bigger budgeted, FX heavy movies the US was making, and there were fewer theatrical distributors for such fare as there was 4-5 years before. And it's not like they could just call Ghosthouse "Evil Dead 3" here, so the rather anonymous title probably did it no favors. Witchery fared SLIGHTLY better, in that I had heard of it a couple of times prior to seeing, but that's probably thanks to its more famous cast. I didn't recognize anyone in Ghosthouse; Witchery offered Blair, Hoff, plus the lovely Catherine Hickland, who was one of those actresses who would seemingly pop up on every TV show in the 80s (including Knight Rider!) and also had sizable roles on some soaps. She gets killed via swordfish, which is pretty great. Perhaps if the movies were more famous Scream would have put a little more effort into the presentation - the transfers are fine, but the movies don't even get their own sub-menus like they usually do for their double features. There's a main screen that offers both "Play Movie" and both trailers, with no scene selection (chapter breaks are included), and the subtitle option obnoxiously located in the center. It's basically what you'd expect from a disc that had a "Play All" option for a true double feature experience, but since it lacks that I can't help but feel it's a bit of a lazy setup.

But that's not really a dealbreaker, and more importantly it kicks off a month's worth of releases from Scream Factory of movies that I haven't seen. Next week is Robot Jox, and the week after that is another double feature: Cellar Dweller and Catacombs, followed by I, Madman, and finally Ghost Town (which also features Ms. Hickland, yay!). More often than not I've seen the movies they're putting out, which is why I usually write about them on Birth Movies Death (formerly Badass Digest) because I've already discussed them here. It's unusual to see so many new-to-me movies in a row (broken up only by Howling II), and they have some new ones too, such as Paul Solet's long awaited sophomore effort, Dark Summer (which I also haven't seen yet). So this place should be a little more lively in the weeks ahead! I apologize for the decreasing number of updates but it's all for a good reason - I've been working really hard to finish my 2nd draft of the HMAD book so I can clean it up and send it off to my editor and hopefully get it to you guys before Christmas (virtual stocking stuffer!). I've been seeing some stuff, but when it comes to time to write, I usually choose the book over writing a new review. Sorry!

What say you?

*In my room I have a giant poster for "La Casa 2" that I got relatively cheap at an auction, because the new title confused the audience that was paying triple digits for similarly oversized art for Dream Warriors and other films of that era. I'm pretty sure they thought it was a poster for House II (the big, Bates House-ish home right in the center of the image probably didn't help), so I was the only bidder and got it for 50 bucks. Score!

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Poltergeist (2015)

MAY 22, 2015

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I've noted before that Poltergeist II: The Other Side was the first horror movie I ever saw in theaters, and thus it's very likely that the original Poltergeist was the first horror movie I saw, period (why would my mom take me to a sequel if I hadn't seen the original, especially if I was obviously kind of young for that stuff?). That said, it doesn't hold TOO much of a nostalgic grip on my heart - I quite like it, but I don't watch it over and over nor do I even consider it one of my 10 (20?) favorite horror films or anything like that. Just because it obviously played a big role in my horror fandom (and also made me afraid of clowns for a while there) doesn't mean I hold it sacred, and thus I went into the remake with an open mind.

It didn't take long for that optimism to fade, however. The impressive cast is unfortunately left to flounder by the painfully by-the-numbers script and unenthusiastic direction, turning in one of the more lifeless big-budget horror remakes I've seen in quite some time. I think I have to go back to the Platinum Dunes Nightmare on Elm Street to find a film with THIS much potential and THIS much talent (and, of course, THIS much money) all going toward a film where absolutely no one seems to really give a shit about anything that's on screen. I'd almost rather it was nigh on unwatchable and riddled with awful storytelling, acting, FX, etc - it would at least be MEMORABLE. This was so rote I had to go off to the little walkway into the theater (where I could still see the screen but no one could see me) to take notes on my phone, because I knew that if I waited until I wrote the review hours later, or even until I got into my car, I'd forget just about everything I had just seen.

Let's get the good out of the way, because it'll be quick. As I said, the cast is great. Even a hack like Gil Kenan is incapable of making Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt anything less than the most charming and likable people you're likely to meet, and they do a fine job recreating that easy, lived-in chemistry that Craig The Nelson and JoBeth Williams had in the original. The kids are also good, and Jared Harris is always a pleasure so casting him as Tangina, essentially, was an inspired choice. And while the script plods along using the original as a guide every step of the way, there's a scene that seems to be paying homage to the sequels, with a garage based attack (a la the first sequel's climax) involving a hand coming out of a puddle in the cement (like Poltergeist III). And Rockwell drinks from a bottle and spits up some worms (hallucination scene), in what HAS to be a callback to II's most famous scare. Not that I particularly love those movies and was overjoyed to see them referenced, but I like the idea of giving them a nod anyway. Also, they didn't give anyone the same names - the family dynamic is exactly the same (two daughters, one son as the middle child) but it's not the Freelings (it's the Bowens) and the first names don't match either.

But that'd mean more if they weren't doing the exact same things in the exact same order. The oldest daughter plays more of a role here than the original Dominique Dunne character, but otherwise every single beat is pretty much the same until the final 15 minutes. The tree, the clown, the TV (static instead of snow), the youngest disappearing, the frazzled, sleep deprived visit to the paranormal team... it's all there, with no real diversions of note. It's not a word for word copy like Psycho, but it might as well have been, because at least then we could just settle into their groove in some way. Instead, they will continually offer new wrinkles or ideas, only for the end result to just be whatever happened in Tobe Hooper's movie. It's like, if Hooper was at point A and took a right then a left to reach point B, Gil Kenan would go straight and then take a right - they'd both be at the same spot, so what does it matter what path they took? I kept hoping for a major change, like they were trying to trick us by being familiar only to throw a major curveball (kill off one of the characters, perhaps), but no. The ending is a bit different but in a way that means nothing unless there's a sequel, which I hope there isn't.

The script also feels like the end result of two different approaches, which, like the Nightmare remake (and also The Fog), renders some plot points completely baffling. For example, the dad isn't in real estate this time, he's a recently laid off exec from John Deere, and moved to the house not because it was part of his company, but because they could afford it. Ignoring the idea that a family led by two people who don't work (she's a stay at home mom) are somehow "reduced" to buying a two story home in the suburbs (they throw some power lines up to make it look like a crappy neighborhood, but it's actually really nice and probably a lot better than most audience members can afford), we still have to wonder, then, why does the poltergeist fixate on them? It's the same plot as before - the housing development was built over a cemetery where the graves were left intact while the tombstones were relocated - but without that connection that Nelson's character had to (flimsily) explain why they specifically were being targeted, I spent the whole movie wondering why none of their neighbors were being harassed. There's some hint that the power lines are involved in the freaky occurrences, but their house isn't even the closest one to them, not by a long shot. For the majority of the film, Kenan ignores the existence of the neighbors entirely to avoid explaining this potential plot hole, but then when their house explodes (it's not a spoiler, it happened in the original and I've been perfectly clear that this movie does nothing different) you see cars in every driveway and even a few neighbors in the street watching.

There are also some new touches that add absolutely nothing, like an alarm system that they spend an inordinate amount of time establishing considering there's no payoff. The oldest daughter's cell phone gets fried (presumably from the ghost, we don't actually see it) and Rockwell buys her a new one, and that's that. And Harris' character is a lame TV show host, but he never even tries to use the family's plight for his show (Rockwell says something like "I told him he can't film", but since Harris never brought it up, it carries no weight). It's like half the people calling the shots on this thing wanted it to be identical, and the other half wanted to carve their own path and really modernize it, and Kenan just said yes to both parties, so you have all these potential new ideas to explore getting lip service before the film gets back on the 33 year old track established by the original. It got to the point where I was happy to see some CGI FX because at least it was something that they couldn't be copying from Hooper for a few minutes.

And that's the other odd thing - there are simply no scares in this movie. The clown doll probably would have worked if it wasn't shown in every trailer, and even if it still did it's kind of pathetic that it would be the highlight by far. The tree is less terrifying than the one from Harry Potter, and once Carol Anne, er, Maddie, gets taken they don't even really try for anything else that might jolt an audience (getting under our skin or offering legit suspense, at this point, would be expecting far too much from this enterprise). This is the 2nd major horror release in a row after Unfriended that is bizarrely lacking in even generic terror - it's not that the scares don't work so much as they simply aren't THERE. It certainly FEELS like a horror movie, but Kenan and the writers forgot to add those actual elements; even when copying Hooper it never approaches any semblance of fear or terror. I got more worked up during the trailers for other genre films (Insidious 3 and Crimson Peak) than I did throughout this entire thing, which is embarrassing considering how easy a sucker I am for family horror now that I have a kid (whose birthday is today!). I felt my pulse rise a tad when Maddie comes back unconscious from the other side, but that's about it - and that's like 75 minutes into the movie or whatever. Little late to start pumping the audience's adrenaline, wouldn't you say?

But the cast! It's a testament to all of them, particularly Rockwell, that the movie is even watchable at all. Sure, his droll one-liners are less amusing when his daughter is missing, but he's still making the most of a thankless role and never once acting like it's beneath his talents, which it most certainly is. Ditto DeWitt, who gets even less to do - there's a halfhearted attempt to make the son the center of the movie this time, but with everyone hellbent on copying the movie where he was NOT the main focus, it doesn't really work. But it still keeps mom from diving into the closet to rescue her daughter, which means DeWitt never gets a big moment (there's no pool either; the alternate Kenan offers is the movie's low point, for sure). There should be some sort of law against casting actors this good in a crummy movie like this and not even giving them a big hero moment to make up for the rest of the crap they had to walk through. I hope they were paid well, at least.

What say you?

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The Houses October Built (2014)

MARCH 2, 2015

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, MOCKUMENTARY
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

I almost wish I could give The Houses October Built a pass based on its concept (and even some of its execution), because it's kind of brilliant and more inspired than most found footage movies of late. Utilizing real "haunts" (the haunted houses or hayrides, zombie runs, etc that pop up just about everywhere during late September and October) to tell its story of five assho- er, people who are taking a tour of attractions in the days leading up to Halloween. They're looking for an underground group known as "Blue Skeleton" that is rumored to deliver the scariest experience ever, and seemingly pissing people off everywhere they go, allowing the movie two key assets that most FF movies lack.

The first asset is that this has more scares early on than most, because they're taking their cameras into the attractions which makes jump scares acceptable, plus they annoy the actors by filming, so there's almost always some sort of altercation that provides tension, at a time when most FF movies are still setting everything up and delaying the scares for logic's sake (as otherwise they'd stop filming). The other one is that the movie offers far more production value than most of its peers; the filmmakers all went to real attractions and either didn't care about release forms or had to put up a lot of those "By entering this location you're agreeing to be in a film..." notices, so the cast is kind of huge, giving it a scope that I don't think I've actually seen in a found footage movie.

But the huge cast is also part of the problem - there are just too many damn cameras, and our main group is too interchangeable for the movie's own good. It's hard enough to distinguish the four guys (one has a beard, that helps) at its center, but it makes it even harder when they're seemingly always running two cameras but not necessarily showing everyone else in the frame (and camera #1 never picks up camera #2, I don't think). Sometimes you can figure it out pretty quickly, other times the scene will nearly be over by the time you realize who is holding the camera, which is a pretty big issue, I think. It's a POV movie and you're not sure whose POV you're seeing. I've said before that I think too many modern FF movies falter by having the director or a regular cameraman shooting everything instead of one of the actors (which is why Blair Witch Project, where the trio of actors were the only ones to ever shoot anything*, works so much better than just about all of them), so it's a shame that this one just found a different way to shoot itself in the foot. That they're all kind of dickish doesn't help matters, but even if they were all super lovable I'd still spend a good chunk of the movie wondering whose eyes I was seeing it through.

Another big problem is kind of a weird one (spoilers ahead), which is that I wish it ended April Fool's Day style, with all of the terror our group faces being revealed to be a prank, that everything was indeed just the really intense haunted attraction that they were after (albeit way too elaborate). When the mysterious "Blue Skeleton" group finally catches up to them and kills/captures them all, it just feels like every other found footage movie that ends with most/all of the protagonists dying, where they had a perfect opportunity to do things differently - not to mention pull off perhaps the only satisfying "it wasn't real" ending in horror history. And the problem mentioned above is even worse here; it's bad enough when you don't know who is filming when it's just some random footage of a legit haunt, but kind of a major issue when it's someone being tortured.

Dumber still, the ending doesn't offer up the epilogue it should, which would be seeing our heroes' corpses used in a haunt. Earlier in the film, one of the characters explains that it doesn't bother him that he might be seeing an actual human leg in an attraction, because he wouldn't know - and he's right. It's dark, you're going through fast, and it's not like you're touching the things, so it's kind of an intriguing what if? scenario, and something the movie could have salvaged its bad ending with (giving one of them a tattoo on a body part that becomes a prop for audiences a year later would be the easy way to sell this concept). Or even having the heroes killed in plain sight of paying audiences (who would just assume it was part of the show) would be fine - basically anything beyond what they give us would have been better, as it's just plain baffling that it ends with something that doesn't pay off a single thing. What's the lesson to learn here? Don't go to haunted attractions? Be happy with the lame ones? I just don't get it.

The film is actually a pseudo remake of something the same team made three years ago (with the same title), but I can't find out too much about it - there's no review for it on its IMDb and director Zack Andrews is obnoxiously vague about how real/fake that one was, saying in an interview that he can't really explain that one's ending because his planned followup (this?) wouldn't work as well. So I guess I'd have to see it to know what he was talking about, but I won't be doing that. Even if I was interested enough to do so, it doesn't look like the original ever got picked up traditionally, so the only way to see it (that I can find) is on the bonus features of the 2014 one's DVD. Which I don't think is lying around in my house anywhere (I'm not joking; it's possible it is - I've won stuff at trivia that I've forgotten about), so I'd have to put effort into obtaining it. But for the record, it sounds like they did an S&Man thing where it's a legit documentary for the most part and then turns a corner once you're totally sold on the reality. It's probably better, honestly, but they didn't endear themselves to me nearly enough for me to want to sit through another 90 minutes of them swearing at each other (there are more F-bombs in this movie than there are in my house when I have to assemble furniture), so oh well. My advice: skip both versions and check out The American Scream, a legit documentary about homemade haunted house attractions that will make you yearn for the Halloween season, unlike this movie which made me glad we're far away from it and thus not currently being bombarded with similar nonsense.

What say you?

*Save for one shot early on where the guy explains Rustin Parr putting a kid in the corner, which was added later to help clarify the ending.

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