La casa del sortilegio

Holy Crapola-fest Batman! Dear God I haven't seen something so utterly bad, so awful, so mindnumbingly ATROCIOUS in all my years! This is pitiful. Just plain pitiful. I've seen dozens and dozens of schlocky, snooze-inducing, inconceivable messes of film but man does BOARDINGHOUSE take the friggin' cake! NEVER have I seen a film where it ACTUALLY hurt me to sit there and watch it! Ok, now that I'm done with my unnecessary banter...let me explain to you the award winning "plot" (LOL!). A man (who is really awkward looking) rents a house for sale and places an ad in the paper for "women 18-25 not attached and beautiful". Naturally, a bunch of fun lovin' 20 somethings show up. Throughout the movie they whine, moan, and complain...occasionally showing up in various states of undress (isn't that a MUST in 80s exploitation??). All fun aside (yeah, right) a poltergeist moves into the house to brutally butcher, chop, mutilate, and murder our adorable girls. These murder sequences are indeed quite gory, but I'll be damned if they were done by anyone who is, at the very least, a competent (and that's saying a lot) fx artist. Take one scene in the beginning of the movie for instance: This poltergeist creature (or whatever you wanna call it) uses some kind of mind control to force a guy to literally disembowel himself. It is night at first, but when the camera goes in for the close-up to show the guy graphically pulling out his intestines it is in broad DAYLIGHT! It's SO noticeable. I won't even mention the fact that the "guts" are simply just sitting at the bottom of his tucked-in shirt for him to grab out...the fx get worse. I can't remember how the movie ends since it's been awhile (or maybe I suffered brain damage), but much of the film we're lead to believe the main protagonist is the one responsible for the ghastly murders. Did I mention how awkward looking he is? Oh yeah, guess I did haha. Up and coming fx artists might want to take notice on how to do really cheap, amateurish make-up and blood. That's the ONLY good I might see coming from this film. Had it not been SOV, the script revised a bit (ok, a lot), cut out the boring/annoying stuff...it would've STILL only been just tolerable! At best!

Oh yeah, I failed to mention this is all filmed in "Horror-Vision". Gory images follow an annoying UFO-like sound, or a poorly done, computer effect full of bright colors with a black-gloved hand on the screen (??) to warn viewers with a weaker stomach. Cool concept...none of which is done right. Don't let gutter trash like this take up 80 some mins. of your life. I regret it.

If you're evaluating this movie in terms of plot structure or character arcs, you're missing the point. If you're saying "the image quality isn't sharp enough," you are consuming the wrong genre.

If you do like backyard horror films, Boardinghouse belongs in the good pile. It has something that most of these films lack: passion. The filmmakers clearly put in more time, effort, planning, and care than most of their peers. The result is something with a vision and level of energy that's hard to replicate, even on films with budgets in the millions.

Years ago, murders occurred in a boarding house. Psychic playboy Jim Royce (director John Wintergate) moves in, and has hot naked chicks surrounding him. No, this is not a porno. Unsurprisingly, the house isn't too keen on this, and soon, bad special effects and more come to terrorize those in the house.

Shot on Video (the first horror movie to be SOV in fact) and released theatrically (yes, a SOV movie came to theaters) in 1982, "Boardinghouse" defies any real proper description. The acting boarders on Amateur Porn levels, the music is a blatant "Halloween" rip off, the gore is unconvincing, the 80's fashion styles are an offense to the eyes, and the plot (so to speak) is a ramshackle of odd events.

That out of the way, the movie is never boring. Yes, it's bad. Yes, it is deficient of any real technical merit. Yet, you can't stop watching it. It's a level of bad that manages to be somewhat enduring in it's ineptitude. The movie moves along, though it never really goes anywhere. Hot chicks are knocked off randomly, without any reason to care about any of them.

In short, to say it's incoherent would be an understatement. It's a movie that defies any real explanation, and is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Whether or not I want to see something like it again I don't know.

I own not one, but two copies of this movie and both of them are the "directors cut", which would be fine except both copies are nothing BUT the directors cut, without the option of watching the movie as it is actually supposed to be viewed. Brutal. At 2:35.00, it's easy to see how an hour could be shaved off this thing. If you miss the 80's, you can leave this thing running with the sound off while you are making a tuna casserole with music playing in the background but sitting down and watching it is tedious and borders on masochistic. It's a shame because it actually looks like an OK piece of 80's shlock. The girls are mostly hot, show skin and the death scenes are decent, while the leading man looks like David Lee Roth's tweaked-out second cousin and for some reason seems to have given up acting after this mess. Can't imagine why.

I worked at a video store where we happened to have a copy of boardinghouse, and after laughing uncontrollably at the cover, I talked some friends into renting it. Since then, for about 4 years straight we would always rent boardinghouse on new years eve and watch it prior to the ball drop, as it became a cult tradition in our area. My favorite line has to be when one of the random men walk in and say "What is this, a harem?" and a random woman replys in a high pitched voice, "no." the mans response is just, "Well, sh*t." who can write dialogue like that? Great scenes include when the refrigerator throws food upon one of the young women, and you can see the arm stretching out of the fridge to throw yogurt at the poor actress. A truly bad movie that is a gas to watch, I would love to get a copy on tape, but 'tis hard to find.