Totentanz der Hexen II

This is one of the two films Umberto Lenzi made for the Italian four part TV-series Houses of Doom, Lucio Fulci helming the others. A young man dreams a recurring nightmare, in which he is running away from someone before he's reaching an old house, where an ugly old woman boils his own head in a big kettle. His girlfriend thinks it's good for him to take a few days off and they drive to an old house that belongs to her family. The house is the one the young man always enters in his nightmare...

Even though the production values are rather low-key, this film is really uncanny and sometimes quite disturbing. Lenzi delivers chilling atmosphere, a classic Freudian nightmare and a decent plot about witchcraft and haunted houses. More thrilling than his other film for the series ("La Casa delle Anime Erranti"; Fulci's two films are "La Casa nel Tempo" and "La Dolce Casa degli Orrori"). In short: This film offers an almost old-fashioned witch story that actually works.

House of witchcraft is a movie about a man that comes to the house of his nightmares, strange things happen there. At first I thought it was rather tacky and cheep but after a while I changed my mind and the further the movie went on the more interesting it came.

I would say that it is rather exciting at times, even if there's no big surprises to be delivered.

Since I saw the English dubbed version it's difficult to judge the acting. The dubbing is fair though, but there's no way of knowing if the original dialog was as bad as in this version, a lot of strange "fabricated" sentences if you know what I mean.

6/10

The director Umberto Lenzi sure was fixated about severed heads and used them over and over again in his two TV-movies "The house of lost souls" and "The house of witchcraft". Doing the same thing doesn't do any favors for this film, it's just a fun turkey to watch with clumsy dialogue.

In these two Lenzi films they have people running around and about way too much but there's less of it in this film.

In all its cookiness this film isn't too bad either. It's more like a slasher with a touch of giallo genre but even for a giallo it's executed in a too straightforward way making the plot rather obvious and leaving very little mystery. In a way it's very American kind of film and that's not a good thing at all in my opinion.

Lenzi has done so many better films upon his career than his later works but still this film has got lots of positive things. Visuals, sets and cinematography are all very good for a TV-movie and upon all it didn't seem like the makers had taken it too seriously. They knew exactly what they were doing.

All in all this is better than "House of lost souls" and way better than "Sweet house of horrors". Fulci's "House of Clocks" however is the best of all these four TV-movies.

The third entry into the Le Case Maledette franchise. German label X Rated Kult called it Ghosthouse 4 although it was officially never released under that name. But it fits perfectly into the franchise but in fact it had nothing to do with the first entry.

Again, it was directed by Lenzi and that's the reason why it was given the name Ghosthouse 4. The effects are again laughable. The witch has a black teeth but when we see close ups you can see it was painted black, or even one face is just painted with colours to give it a demonic look. I guess a lot of toddlers would do it better. The story is okay because there are a few flashbacks with Carlo (Jean-Christophe Brétigniere) looking towards his own severed head. Again Lenzi added a skull with maggots towards the end, a thing he did earlier.

The acting was rather okay this time with Cinzia Monreale being the biggest name (Buio Omega (1979) and The Beyond (1982)). For non horror geeks Vernon Dobtcheff was seen in In The Name Of The Rose (1986) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

Outdated and even a bit cheesy to todays standards and as I stated earlier in other reviews, very low on everything.

Gore 1/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

This was my second House of Doom viewing, having previously enjoyed Lucio Fulci's House of Clocks. Witchcraft opens with a man having a reoccurring nightmare in which he enters a house only to find an old hag/witch boiling his decapitated head in a cauldron! This plays a significant and fairly predicable part of the plot. We get bad dubbing, some laughable script, good looking woman and reasonably gory deaths, though this made for TV movie is very tame compared to director Umberto Lenzi's other films, eg the notorious Cannibal Ferox. I'm a big fan of Italian horror and I got my fix, it's just far from being a classic.