Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (Quella villa accanto al cimitero) is a wrap to a loosely connected trilogy of films regarding the boundaries between the living and the dead, and Catriona MacColl is in all three.
In The Gates of Hell, a priest’s suicide unleashes a zombie apocalypse. The Beyond is about an old estate in Louisiana, which is discovered to harbor one of the gateways to hell. And lastly, in this film, a family is haunted by the undead owner of their new home.
Catriona MacColl and Paolo Malco play a couple, Lucy and Norman Boyle, who move to a small town in Massachusetts so Norman can complete the research of a colleague who committed suicide. Naturally, the couple goes to live with their son Bob in the same house the man committed suicide in. The house was built and inhabited originally by a Dr. Freudstein, a local doctor with a less than stellar reputation. And it seems the good doctor hasn’t moved out!
Once they get to the house, of course, weird things start happening. Lucy discovers a tombstone has been inlaid into the wooden floor of their living room, a bat attacks Norman in the basement, and Bob claims he is seeing and talking to a girl who warns the family to leave. On top of that, the weird babysitter they hired to look after Bob just won't leave! Typical of this kind of film, they don’t make much effort to leave, although there is a scene where they say they have every intention of finding another house. It's not as if they couldn't afford anything else, because they just moved from New York City!
To try and assess the acting in a film of this nature is difficult. Everyone is dubbed in post, and it seems the director just told everyone to ham it all up. Catriona MacColl and Giovanni Frezza are the worst “offenders” here. They are constantly dialed up to ten when they could get by on half the mugging. I wouldn’t say anyone is awful here, because honestly it’s hard to tell. They are all really stiff in some scenes scenes or have just slipped into silent film mode in others.
For all its cheap gory glory, which includes a knife through a woman’s head, a fire poker through another’s neck, and a disemboweled body in the basement, the film does have an interesting charm about it. It is so strangely nonsensical and oddly acted that you can’t help but kind of be charmed by it. It also has some strange cultural influences, obviously, the name of Dr. Freudstein connotes that psychology en mass is creating some sort of monster out of humanity. Or perhaps that Freud himself was a monster? The real kicker for me is the quote at the end of the film from Henry James of all people!
Blue Underground has done a stellar job with the video presentation here. We get a very film like image that is quite pleasing to look at. Detail is abundant and sharp as can be. Colors appear to be natural, and the black levels seem to be spot on. There is however a slight sheen of video noise above the image, similar to BU’s release of The Stendhal Syndrome and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. I don’t know if this is part of the original image, or if the film “grain” has been added in post to make it appear more film like. There have been various debates about this topic online.
Sadly, the audio doesn’t fare so well. The English dub is the louder of the two tracks, and the dialogue is clear for the most part but it’s mixed really low, and the music is much too loud. The Italian language track is a bit muffled and you really have to crank up the volume to make it out. The English track is easily the way to go, and you get the bonus of the dubbing of young Bobby’s voice by an adult female, it’s really obnoxious, but fun to laugh at. There are optional English, French, and Spanish subtitles provided as well.
If you're looking for bonus features, this has em! It's a plentiful array of interviews with most of the major production staff onscreen and off. Meet the Boyles: interviews with Catriona MacColland Paolo Malco, Children of the Night: interviews with Giovanni Frezza and Silvia Collatina, Tales of Laura Gittleson: interview with Dagmar Lassander, My Time with Terror: interview with Carlo De Mejo, A Hanuted House Story: Interviews with Co-Writers Dardano Sacchetti and Elisa Briganti, To Build a Better Death Trap: Interviews with Cinematographer Sergio Salvati, Special Make Up efffects Artist Maurizio Trani, Special effects Artist Gino De Rossi, and Actor Giovanni De Nava. All these interviews are presented in HD. Rounding out the generous portion of bonus material are a deleted scene: Bat Attack Aftermath, presented in standard definition due to source material, the theatrical trailer which is in HD, a TV spot, and a Poster and Still Gallery.
As a fan of Italian horror films, I have been asked in the past if I am a fan of Lucio Fulci or Dario Argento. I don’t see why one couldn’t like both, and I don’t necessarily see them as competition. Yes, they both make horror films, but in entirely different modes. Fulci’s style was far more hallucinatory and gory, as Argento’s had a sharper sense of beauty and overall forward thinking, evolving style.
I don't like saying one is better than the other, because it all comes down to personal preference. The two certainly didn’t have a war to see who was the king of Italian horror, as they were working on The Wax Mask, when Fulci died. Argento was producing, and asked his longtime special effects man, Sergio Stivaletti to complete the project after Fulci’s untimely death. For Fulci fans, this disc really is a must have. The video presentation is outstanding and I doubt it even looked this good upon initial release. For everyone else, it’s a rental. Grab some beer, some friends and have a laugh!
Film Score: 2.5/5 Disc Score: 3/5
[Blu-ray screens via Blu-ray.com]
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