Totentanz der Hexen II

The third film in the Houses of Doom series (after Lucio Fulci's The House of Clocks and The Sweet House of Horrors), Umberto Lenzi's The House of Witchcraft has one of those oddball Italian horror storylines that feels like it was made up on the fly, with logic definitely taking a back seat to atmosphere (at least I think that was Lenzi's intention).

The film starts with Luke Palmer (Andy J. Forest) waking from a nightmare in which he enters a country house, where he finds an old hag (Maria Cumani Quasimodo) in the kitchen, about to add HIS severed head to her cauldron. Luke explains to his psychiatrist - his sister-in-law Elsa (Susanna Martinková) - that the scary dreams began when he married his wife Martha (Sonia Petrovna), who has since developed an interest in the occult that has put a strain on their relationship.

Still, when Martha suggests to Luke that they go on a country break to try and save their marriage, he is happy to go along, but is surprised to find that the house Martha has booked looks just like the one in his nightmares. The owner of the house is a blind concert pianist, Andrew Mason, who shows them around the house: sure enough, the kitchen is all too familiar to Luke. Undeterred, Luke stays at the house, but witnesses something strange from his bedroom window: the old hag from his nightmares beating an old priest to death.

Feeling a little weirded out, Luke phones Elsa and asks her to come to the house, which she does, accompanied by her teenage daughter Debra (Maria Stella Musy); Mr. Mason's pretty blonde niece Sharon (Marina Giulia Cavalli) also arrives to stay for a while. Over the next couple of days, a series of bizarre occurrences and violent deaths lead Luke to believe that his wife is a witch!

With a random, nonsensical narrative (what was the relevance of the fatal car crash witnessed by Luke and Martha as they drive to the house?) and diabolical dialogue (try keeping a straight face when Elsa calmly announces, in all seriousness, that Martha needs an exorcist), The House of Witchcraft is far from good, but not quite bad enough to qualify as 'so bad it's good'. The pace is plodding and the deaths - a stabbing with a pair of shears and another with a kitchen knife - lack imagination and decent gore effects. After much inexplicable silliness (which includes a snowstorm in the cellar!), Lenzi wraps things up with an ending guaranteed to leave the viewer stunned by its stupidity.

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for the sex scene, tasty Marina Giulia Cavalli ticking the gratuitous nudity box.

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.

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

This was the second to last of a quartet of films, unofficially known as the 'House Quartet', that were made in Italy in 1989. Having seen Lucio Fulci's two efforts - the good House of Clocks and the pretty terrible Sweet House of Horrors - I wasn't going into this one with much hope. It would seem that Lenzi's two efforts in this series aren't as well watched as Fulci's, and based on the strength of this film - it's not hard to see why. Umberto Lenzi definitely had the ability to make good films - his crime flicks are second to none, and most of his Giallo output was pretty good, but towards the end of his career he didn't seem to care much, and this is one of his careless efforts. The film was made for TV, and this is made obvious through the plot, which is entirely mundane and basically follows a man who travels to a house after suffering loads of nightmares. The film doesn't have much going for it; the cinematography is bland, the acting is nothing to write home about and the story didn't deserve a film to be based on it. Here in the UK, this film has a release by the cheapo DVD label 'Vipco' - and it completely fits into their little series as it's such a 'bare bones' film. Overall - not recommended!