La villa delle anime maledette

I usually have a high level of tolerance for inept and cheaply made horror movies from the early 80s, especially if they come out of Italy, but I honestly had to drag myself towards the end of "Don't Look in the Attic", and constantly had to battle the urge not to press the fast-forward button. What an incredible dud of a film!

The plot is senseless, incomprehensible, and - worst of all - utterly boring. Three people that are related but don't know each other inherit a mansion in which their parents died in 1955. The mansion is supposedly in Turin, but I'm guessing it's in the middle of the zoo of Turin judging by the exotic animal sounds coming from outside. The mansion also comes with an ageing butler that pops up out of nowhere. There's a whole lot of whining about ancient family curses and conversations with tombstones, but zero action. The body count is low, and the couple of death sequences are ruined by miserable editing and lousy effects (like the woman who gets run over by a car). Terrible.

Writer/director Carlo Ausino previously made "Torino Violenta", which is one of the worst Poliziotesschi flicks from the 70s but still vastly superior over this nonsense.

Greetings And Salutations, and welcome to my review of Don't Look In The Attic; here's the breakdown of my ratings:

Story - 0.25 Direction - 0.50 Pace - 0.25 Acting - 0.75 Enjoyment - 0.75

TOTAL - 2.50 out of 10

Oh my God, this movie is so bad that I kinda loved it. Though, I was irked by the story's possibility. There is enough scope within to scribe a classic horror tale.

I once read in a review that writer/director films are better as they allow for their vision of the story to reach the screen. That only works if the writer/director is talented. Unfortunately, with Don't Look In The Attic, they're not. There are so many holes in the story, be it structural or narrative, that I wouldn't be able to start to critique them - so I won't.

As for the direction side, I can easily comment on that. For one, the pace meanders along slower than the story. And, I will say this for the director; he must have known because he did try to alleviate the monotony in pre-production. There's a particularly lovely ginger pussy that appears during a bout of exposition. There's a conversation between three people, and it's shot at a dreadful angle and too-close a range. It feels and looks awkward. Enter the inserted shots of the pussycat reclining on the leather cushion of an armchair. There's no need for them, apart from breaking up the nastiness, and they're filmed on a different stock. If anything, the cat shots are crisper than the rest of the movie. But I can't knock it too much I'm a pussy lover, not a dog man. Though, the mishap that had me smiling the most was the soundtrack. The mansion they are staying in is in Turin and miles from anywhere. Imagine my surprise hearing the sounds of the jungle in the background, complete with screeching monkeys. Not satisfied with using it once they use the same sound segment throughout the film. It always brought a smile, and I expected to see Tarzan, Cheeta, and Jane swing in on a vine. It would have made for a better picture - he meant to get the most for his budget! There are more, many more, but they were my faves.

The cast isn't too bad. Though, what can you expect(?) It must have been evident reading the script how bad the film would be, so why put too much effort into it? Just turn up, have fun, get paid - I hope they got paid.

If you love bad movies, check out Don't Look In The Attic. Otherwise, stay the hell away. I don't want to be responsible for upsetting somebody; life's too short - Especially to watch this flick.

Please feel free to visit my Absolute Horror and Killer Thriller Chiller lists to see where I ranked Don't Look In The Attic. Better yet, you can search for better viewing.

Take Care & Stay Well.

During a séance, a woman is warned by the spirit of her dead mother- "DON'T GO TO TURIN....DON'T GO TO THE VILLA". So what does she do? Well, naturally, she high-tails it to Turin, and heads straight for the villa. Said villa, which she and her siblings have recently inherited, is haunted by malevolent spirits who enjoy driving people nuts and turning lights red. By the time our dim-witted leading lady finally looks in the attic, you'll most likely be in a deep slumber. Who cares, though? You will miss absolutely nothing of interest, and any dream you may have will be infinitely more entertaining than this uninvolving, crudely dubbed Eurotravesty.

3.5/10

I saw the Mogul Video VHS of this. That's another one of those old 1980s distributors whose catalog I wish I had!

This movie was pretty poor. Though retitled "Don't Look in the Attic," the main admonition that is repeated in this is "Don't go to the villa." Just getting on the grounds of the villa is a bad idea. A character doesn't go into the attic until an hour into the movie, and actually should have done it earlier because of what is learned there.

The movie starts in Turin, Italy in the 1950s. Two men are fighting, and a woman is telling them the villa is making them do it. One man kills the other, then regrets it, and the woman pulls out the knife and stabs him with it. She flees the villa, and after she's left a chair moves by itself (what's the point of that?), but when in the garden a hand comes up through the ground and drags he into the earth.

From there, it's the present day, thirty years later. There's a séance that appears suddenly and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the movie. The children of the woman from the prologue are inheriting the house. The main daughter is played by the same actress who played her mother. At least one of the two men from the prologue seems to reoccur as another character too. She's haunted by some warnings not to go to the villa, but they all do, since if they do not use it, they forfeit it. People die. A lawyer who has won all his cases tries to investigate a little. The ending is pretty poor. Why was the family cursed? An unfortunately boring movie.

There's an amusing small-print disclaimer on the back of the video box that reads "The scenes depicted on this packaging may be an artist's impression and may not necessarily represent actual scenes from the film." In this case, the cover of the box is an illustration that does more or less accurately depict the aforementioned woman dragged underground scene, although there are two hands, and the woman is different. It's true, sometimes the cover art has nothing to do with the movie. I also recall seeing a reviewer who had a bad movie predictor scale, in which movies with illustrations on the cover instead of photos got at least one point for that.

Now, I LOVE Italian horror films. The cheesier they are, the better. However, this is not cheesy Italian. This is week-old spaghetti sauce with rotting meatballs. It is amateur hour on every level. There is no suspense, no horror, with just a few drops of blood scattered around to remind you that you are in fact watching a horror film. The "special effects" consist of the lights changing to red whenever the ghost (or whatever it was supposed to be) is around, and a string pulling bed sheets up and down. Oooh, can you feel the chills? The DVD quality is that of a VHS transfer (which actually helps the film more than hurts it). The dubbing is below even the lowest "bad Italian movie" standards and I gave it one star just because the dialogue is so hilarious! And what do we discover when she finally DOES look in the attic (in a scene that is daytime one minute and night the next)...well, I won't spoil it for anyone who really wants to see, but let's just say that it isn't very "novel"!