Rish's Reviews
With a name like Ghosthouse, it had to be good! Right? Well, maybe it was retitled Ghosthouse when someone heard that. Oddly enough, in Italy, this was advertised as House III (La Casa 3, which might explain why the House series jumps from II to IV). But you know, "god-awful" is the word I use to describe Ghosthouse. The tape I rented was stopped at the twenty four minute point. I figured that's as far as the previous viewer got. And I envy him.
So, there's an evil house with an evil history. And a guy and his bad-acting, Weird-speaking (if Weird was a language, she'd be a fluent linguist) girlfriend hear an evil message over their short-wave radio, and go to investigate it. They run into some other folk, some of them evil, some of them just bad actors, and everybody converges on the evil house. There are deaths, and there are other stuff, and eventually, the movie ends.
From the sick, disturbing beginning to the senseless ending (that didn't arrive fast enough), this was a bad movie. Though it was Italian-made, I'm sure no one in the boot-shaped country would claim it. At about twenty minutes into it, it started to get funny to me. But funny in a laugh-so-you-don't-throw-the-VCR-out-the-second-story-window kind of way. Ghosthouse featured some truly beautiful dialogue, worthy of needlepoint. Such as this line spoken by the barely-coherent girl: "Paul, I don't like this place. It's depressing. There's something evil about it." Or how about this one? Guy 1, "Maybe there's something supernatural about all this, guys." Guy 2, "I don't know, all I know are computers." Sheila Goldberg is credited as Dialogue, so maybe it's her fault. Though there was a passable performance or two, most of the acting was just awful. I'm talking borderline-literate third graders reading their lines for the first time awful. In my notes I wrote, "There's something HORRIBLY bad about these actors–-especially the radio voices. And the female lead (Lara Wendel) is less dramatically talented than a porno actress." Well said, Rish.
There was one nice idea in the film–-a ham radio picks up an evil transmission of deaths that happen later in the story–-but that was just enough to make the movie suck even more. Somebody ought to transplant that idea to a decent film. Throughout, I would ask myself questions: Why would there be a guillotine in a child's room? How many times can someone back into the killer? Why would the stupid girl who said the house was evil and depressing during the day go into the house alone at night?
As usual, I tried to see good in this. There was a neat scary little girl. And finding a head in the clothesdryer was okay. You know, the Threat might have actually been the clown doll instead of the Weapon, but I had to give props to the clown doll. You understand. Even that didn't work, though, because said clown doll was scary when it was supposed to be harmless, but stupid-looking when it was supposed to be scary. Even the old blood in the faucet gag wasn't awful, so I'm thinking somebody (maybe one person) that worked on this thing had some good ideas. He was probably the assistant prop master or a best boy or something. The scariest thing about the flick was this indescribably weird and creepy music that played when the ghost would appear. It was like a marriage of a pull-string toy and an evil synthesizer. But the film's main theme, which played much more often, made the "Father Dowling Mysteries" theme seem like the music from Elm Street.
This was a poorly made, irritating, badly-written, "shitty!" (from my notes again) horror film, with production values that make Blair Witch Project look like Waterworld. But I'm sure that somebody out there somewhere considers this their favourite movie. Poor guy.