Damn, do I love a great haunted-house movie! And then there’s Ghosthouse.
In a large Massachusetts home — a ghosthouse, if you will — 11-year-old Henriette Baker (Kristen Fougerousse) stabs the family cat. As punishment, her father locks the girl in the basement, where she hugs her terrifying clown doll for comfort. Upstairs, somehow (and never explained, because ghosthouse), her parents are slaughtered brutally.
Flash-forward 20 years later, when Paul (Greg Scott, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II), a ham radio operator who makes a good bowl of chili, hears a cry for help over the airwaves, so he and his girlfriend (Lara Wendel, Tenebre) track the plea to its source: our ghosthouse.
Other dumb young people are there camping out, so they all experience the manse’s terrors together: a head in the washing machine, a Doberman with nips the size of novelty giant pencil erasers, a sink that spews blood, an errant fan blade, a rocking camper, visions of the creepy Henriette and her clown doll, which occasionally sports fangs and looks to have been ordered straight from the Poltergeist merch store.
As Paul says, “It’s all just one big horrible mess.” The same can be said for the movie, directed with by-the-numbers passivity by Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox). Little effort is put toward spatial orientation in the titular residence; even less toward the script, built upon illogic. Lenzi seems intent only on getting his money’s worth for its indecipherable theme song, played in part no fewer than 17 times in 95 minutes, yet one that drives you insane upon first listen. —Rod Lott
But…Ghosthouse!