Have you ever noticed that many of the children in Italian horror films are just as unappealing as the grotesque monster attacking them?
In his flick The House by the Cemetery, director Lucio Fulci puts yet another thoroughly unlikable brat through the rigor-mortis ringer by having him not only being trapped in a house by a cemetery, but one where the confusing zombie Dr. Freudstein — tell me about your mother, Mr. Fulci — is stalking and slashing its inhabitants with psychotic abandon.
Dr. Freudstein, by the way, is a 150-year-old medical man whose guts are filled with maggots and grue. He was notorious for performing human experiments that are apparently still going on, mostly via blades through the head and jaggedly sliced throats. How exactly that’s helping science is beyond me, but I heard he recently won a large grant.
Fulci favorites Catriona MacColl (The Beyond) and Paolo Malco (The New York Ripper) are Lucy and Norman Boyle, respectively, an upwardly mobile couple who uproots their hectic city life for a Massachusettsian existence in an unnecessarily spooky house by a cemetery. I hope they got a good deal, especially since Norman’s colleague apparently murdered a woman there the week before.
Their unattractive son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza), complete with an unnerving dubbed voice, is haunted by a somewhat helpful German girl who lives in a framed picture of the house by cemetery.
Full of all the realistic blood-spatterings, gut-spillings and throat-rippings we’ve come to know and love from Fulci — as well as another head-scratching ending that puts an uneasy layer of dread over the entire proceedings — House by the Cemetery is one of his career high points, full of stabby endpoints. —Louis Fowler