HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
The only Fulci film I half-like
You know, until recently, I've had more trouble spelling "cemetery" than "necessarily".
So there I was in the video store the other day. Horror section, of course, although I'll have to buckle under and rent Beaches soon because I agreed to see that in exchange for this girl I know seeing Return of the Living Dead. (reviewer's note: it's a year after I wrote this review, and she still hasn't kept her end of the deal. I saw Beaches for this?)
And I looked at some of the covers, and pondered a little the sheer glorious banality of it all. I mean, awful 80's slashers may be terrible overall, but one thing they really do is really transport you to the 80's.Cheesy 80's teen sex comedies are the same way. They virtually defined that decade...and I did a lot of my growing up in it, so it's always fun to revisit, even when I'm using crap to do it. So, I almost picked up a copy of House of Death. Which, for some reason, often gets played on A&E. And next to it was a copy of House By The Cemetery...with almost exactly the same cover. (both have a house, a mostly blue color scheme, a moon, and an arm from offpage holding a bloody bladed weapon)
Wow, two movies next to each other with the same cover? I found that odd. I looked on the back of HBTC, saw a guy with a really lousy makeup job, and..."Directed by Lucio Fulci". I pondered briefly, and decided to rent it. My first experience with Fulci was awful, but hey, I always give acclaimed directors three chances. Three strikes though, and I'm happy to say that Oliver Stone just doesn't know what he's doing.
So I decided to watch this one...problem was, I decided to watch this one after about five beers. The decision seemed fine at the time - after all, it's from the guy who made Zombie, I may need the beer - but now I kinda wish I'd watched it sober, because I may have liked it more. As it was...it wasn't bad! It certainly had its good moments...like the turning of the deadbolt...the eyes in the dark...mmm, nice creepy stuff like that.
Problems keep me from saying that I genuinely liked it overall. The gore leads me to think that Fulci just doesn't have much in the way of gore ideas (rip throat, spurt blood. Check.) (maybe it doesn't help that I saw Kurosawa's Ran a few days before and it had one hell of a great neck-spurt in it - more of a neck-explosion) And the little kid...I mean, I understand that this is dubbed, and it ain't Fulci's fault, but whoever did the voice for this kid would have been no less convincing if it was Morgan freakin' Freeman. It was that bad.
So...I won't quite chalk this one up as a strike, but nor will I be chalking it up as much of a winner. Anyway, I'll be renting The Gates of Hell soon. I'll probably not like it (it does seem to divide his fans from his non fans, no?), but hey, I'll be giving it a chance. Drills, vomit, and all.