La casa delle anime erranti

Blood gushes from a statuette as a Tibetan monk hacks at it with a hatchet; a skeleton rolls along in a wheelchair; tarantulas crawl over dead bodies; a small child has blood on his hands: these nightmarish visions are a regular occurrence for poor geology student Carla (Stefania Orsola Garello). Her boyfriend Kevin tries to put her mind at rest: "The doctors gave you a reasonable explanation", he reminds her, "They said that you have psychic powers. You're a medium."

It's craptastic dialogue like this, along with inept gore, that will make The House of Lost Souls a painful watch or a bearable one, depending on your particular proclivities. Personally speaking, the dreadful writing and bad special effects make this a reasonably enjoyable time waster -- not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but bonkers enough to entertain for the duration.

Directed by Umberto Lenzi, The House of Lost Souls was the fourth and last film in The Houses of Doom collection of made-for-TV movies, (the others being The House of Clocks and The Sweet House of Horror, both directed by Lucio Fulci, and The House of Witchcraft, also by Lenzi). It sees a group of young people taking refuge at an old motel where they encounter the malevolent spirits of several murder victims that seek revenge on the living.

What follows is a random series of supernatural events, fairly typical of the Ghosthouse series (this film is also known as Ghosthouse 3), in which the living are tormented by the dead, before they are decapitated one by one. It's all extremely silly stuff, with the craziest death being that of the youngest of the group, Gianluca (Costantino Meloni), who loses his head to a vicious washing machine. Other victims are separated from their noggins by chainsaw, axe and a dumb waiter! The House of The Lost Souls also features one of my favourite lines of dialogue in Italian horror: on learning that the doors and windows of the motel have been sealed shut, one of the characters exclaims, "Reinforced concrete! Must be 27 metres thick!". How does he know?

In the film's suitably daft finale, Kevin uses a metal detector to locate the heads of the murder victims so that he can lay their spirits to rest. I didn't know metal detectors had a 'severed head' setting.

5/10. It's garbage, but entertainingly so.

Can it get any worser to understand it all? i mean, just look at the release of Ghosthouse (1988). It had an good script but was also called La Casa 3 clocking in on Evil Dead's success. Then came Ghosthouse 2 but that's a title used for a few different flicks and wasn't directed by Lenzi and had nothing to do with the original one. Here I just watched what they call in Germany Ghosthouse 3. But it has again nothing to do with Ghosthouse, in fact it should be called La Casa 5 but it doesn't. It's just one of the fourth part of the series "Le case maledette" (Doomed Houses) also including La dolce casa degli orrori, La casa nel tempo and La casa del sortilegio.

Again, as so many Italian flicks this is pure trash and just look at how it was made, it looked much older, it even looks as a seventies release. The effects were again dull and laughable. But this time a few killings did happen all as decapitations. The most notorious one the one with the laundry machine. Nevertheless it's again low on every part. It's so strange that a man like Lenzi could make such supernatural trash. The ghosts are just real people that are standing there with wooden performances and thats' what most of the acting is. Some did make it into the Italian scene.

Okay, it was a television release but still from someone who made Cannibal Ferox this is trash.

Gore 1/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

It's the old dark house plot again with added gore. Foolish young people take shelter in in old house or in this case, hotel and all hell then breaks loose. Not one of the most original stories in the field of horror films and sadly there is nothing really new in this made for TV movie. Other than the only known case of death by washing machine that is!

Made in 1989 but looks even more dated than that, the jocks and bimbos in the American splatter films were pretty air-headed but they were always far worse and incredibly stupid in the European ones. Anyone with an ounce of sense would see what a 'con-damned' building this house was and run for the hills. These just wait around aimlessly to be picked off by the forces of evil.

The sound dubbing isn't very good either and somewhat annoying as none of the voices seem to be in tune with the actors. And the small child while I guess, is supposed to be cute is just a major pain in the backside. But then again, none of the cast are sympathetic and you don't really care what happens to them.

Thus it rattles onto a dull finale and disappointment. Like a lot of Spanish and Italian films in this genre, the horror effects happen for no rhyme or reason, just to try to elicit a scare. There has to be some bounds of credibility and logic in even the most dopey plots.

Only for really die hard fans of the director.

A young group of geologists can't get out of a village due to a landslide and seek accommodations at a creepy, isolated hotel. Of course it is haunted and soon the ghosts of the killer owners and their victims (including a random Buddhist monk) start picking them off. It is going to be a sad day when I run out of '80s Italian horrors to watch. This has all the elements I love (atmospheric main location, gruesome killings, funny dialogue). In fact, one of the opening lines let me know I was in for a treat right away. After waking from a nightmare, Carla tells her boyfriend and he replies, "The doctors had a perfectly reasonable explanation. They said you had psychic ability." Another great exchange:

"Mary's disappeared!"

"Disappeared?"

"Yeah, and we could start looking for her if you didn't ask so many questions."

I came upon this one by pure accident and wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Like the other films in the Ghosthouse universe, the plot isn't the best and the characters are crudely drawn at best, but the horror set pieces are memorable enough to keep one's interest throughout and it doesn't even crack the 90 minute runtime mark, so it's not a big commitment. People walking around with minimal horror makeup shouldn't be as creepy as they are in this movie. A lot of the horror scenes are made creepier by how unremarkable and mundane they are and then the film hits you with something insane like someone being decapitated by a washing machine.