La casa del sortilegio

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.

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.

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 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