La casa del sortilegio

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.

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.

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.

I like La casa del sortilegio aka The House Of Witchcraft, but it is for certain not one of Umberto Lenzi's best: Seven Blood Stained Orchids, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and a few others are not challenged by this little flick. Anyway, if you like horror with the theme of black magic, an evil witch and some killings you may dare to watch this one - it will serve you with some nostalgic horror and outdated but still fun to watch gore effects (but only a very few, remember, the movie was produced for TV and not for cinema). The best part of The House Of Witchcraft is in my opinion that nice creepy soundtrack - synths supported by mysterious sounds and ghostly voices - a trademark of (Italian) horror movies of the 70s and 80s, and something everyone who want to become a serious maker, director or whatever of horror movies should study thoroughly. Only recommended for the true hardcore lover of Italian horror.

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.