Blu-ray Review: GHOSTHOUSE/WITCHERY Double Feature

While their contributions to horror and exploitation cinema in the ’70s and ’80s can never be understated, the Italians had a funny habit of co-opting unrelated movies and branding them as sequels to one another despite the fact that they were never designed as such. When Lucio Fulci made his classic Zombie in 1979, it was released as Zombi 2 in Europe despite having nothing to do with George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, originally released as Zombi overseas. Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead films played under the titles La Casa and La Casa 2, which wouldn’t be anything unusual if there weren’t three more totally unrelated La Casa movies released after the fact. The implication is that these movies were sequels to the Evil Dead series. They were not.

Thanks to Scream Factory, two of those films are hitting Blu-ray on one double feature disc under their American titles, Ghosthouse (La Casa 3) and Witchery (La Casa 4). While the movies have only surfaces in common — a house, supernatural goings-on, the occasional crudeness and a general goofiness to them — both are a ton of fun.

First up is 1988’s Ghosthouse, from two legends of Italian exploitation cinema: producer Joe D’Amato and director Umberto Lenzi (credited here as the wonderfully monikered “Humphrey Humbert”). It stars Greg Scott as Paul, a Ham radio enthusiast who intercepts a distress call that leads him and girlfriend Martha (Lara Wendel) — plus a group of mostly doomed friends who meet up with the couple later — to investigate a creepy old house haunted by the spirit of a little girl and her clown doll. Aren’t sold yet? Read that description again. Haunted house. Clown doll. Ham radio.

Ghosthouse is a pretty standard “bad place” horror film — the house is haunted and the people who go there and are too foolish to ignore the warnings end up dead — but it’s one done with so much energy and glee that its charms are difficult to resist. Director Lenzi built a career largely dependent on imitating that which came before him (not to the extent of, say, a Bruno Mattei, but enough that it’s noticeable). Ghosthouse is his Fulci film. There are specific shots and moments in the movie that feel ripped right out of Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy, whether it’s a deliberate zoom-in to a tarantula crawling across a dust-covered coffin or the floor of the haunted house giving way to reveal a pool of milky white acid littered with decomposed corpses. While never as nightmarish, mean-spirited or gory as a Fulci film, Ghosthouse does manage to capture some of his tone. It almost feels like an American take on Fulci, even though the film is quite distinctly Italian in its logic and imagery.

There’s a sense of fun to it all, too, reminiscent of something like Night of the Demons. Sometimes the “fun” is probably unintentional, like when a character says something or acts in a way no human being would (and all of them do at one time or another), or when the movie turns over far too much of its running time to a demented caretaker stalking the heroes. Much of it is on purpose, though; the movie has none of Lenzi’s usual ugliness or misanthropy. It doesn’t make sense under any kind of scrutiny, but so few of these Italian efforts do. They’re more about eliciting reactions. My reaction to Ghosthouse was total enjoyment.

Released the same year as Ghosthouse, the second title on the disc, Witchery (aka La Casa 4, but credited onscreen as Witchcraft), is also about a group of people trapped in a house and getting killed off by supernatural forces — this time a witch instead of a ghost, as implied by the title. Though D’Amato is a producer on this one too, directing duties this time out fall to Fabrizio Laurenti, whose only other theatrical feature credit is 1993’s The Crawlers. It’s a nastier movie than Ghosthouse, depicting needles going through faces, mouths being sewn shut, people being burned alive for what feels like an eternity and ghost rape. You know… the usual.

The difference here is that it’s only in these set pieces that Witchery really comes to life; the remainder of the film’s running time is devoted to poky exposition and acting that’s too good to be enjoyably bad but not good enough to actually be good. There’s higher camp value if only for the casting of both Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff as two of the leads, though the finished film makes little use of either actor. The movie feels a little slicker and more polished than something like Ghosthouse, but also less consistent. The death scenes are impressively staged and well constructed (if in need of more editing at times), punctuated too often by dead space.

Scream Factory’s Blu-ray double feature of Ghosthouse and Witchery presents both films in their original 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratios and in full 1080p HD. Ghosthouse is a little on the soft, washed-out side, probably a result of its source material rather than the transfer, while Witchery is more colorful and vibrant. Considering the age and budget of both movies, the HD transfers are solid. The lossless 2.0 audio tracks present the dialogue clearly while offering enough atmosphere and surround activity to meet expectations. For a Scream Factory release, there is a disappointing lack of any bonus features for both titles, save for their original theatrical trailers.

Taken on their own, it’s possible that neither Ghosthouse nor Witchery would provide a completely satisfying addition to the horror fan’s growing Blu-ray collection. As two halves of a double feature, though, they are a great deal of fun — a giddy mix of ’80s American horror and Italian exploitation. I wasn’t really aware of either title prior to watching this disc, and while Scream Factory is great at providing special deluxe editions of many of the classic titles we horror fans have loved for years, it’s nice that they’re digging deep and unearthing lesser-known titles like these. If nothing else, I’ll now be on the lookout for La Casa 5.

Ghosthouse Score: 3.5/5

Witchery Score: 3/5

Disc Score: 3/5