RELEASE DATE: 1989
RATED: Unrated
REVIEWED BY: The DarkSider
This Poltergeist turned into Casper The Friendly Ghost film, begins one evening at a rather large home. Some masked dude breaks in and robs something in a safe. Side note, why are safes so easy to break into in movies? Might as well leave your valuables on the kitchen counter with a note saying "free" on it.
Anyhow the home owners, two folks named Roberto and Mary, come home and end up getting their brains beat in literally. The masked fellow takes their bodies out of the home wrapped in a white shroud, prop them up in his car and pushes them down a hill. Remember that last little bit because it will translate to a big continuity f*ck up later.
Fast forward to Mary and Roberto's funeral, which is being attended by their kids Marco and Sarah. Allow me to stop here and say that of all the films I've dared to take on with kids as the main characters, these two were absolutely the most annoying little bastards I've ever seen.
This is apparent when they arrive at their parent's funeral late, pop gum through the whole thing and make fun of the priest to cap off their depravity. Mind you, this is actually their best behavior in the film. The rest of the way they whine excessively, cry, laugh at people who get seriously hurt, act like general jack offs, etc. I was pleading with the gods of bad movies they would be off'd at every moment in my viewing experience.
The kids come under the protection of two of the most unfortunate people on the planet, their Aunt Marcia and Uncle Carlo. What they did to deserve this, well I imagine it was unmentionable. They head back to the house of the murder and the kids act like asses to them. First night there, Marcia wakes up to a mysterious noise in the house. After 850 or so false scares, she finds out it�s a toy housefly which someone had wound up. By the way, who the hell markets a toy house fly? Seth Brundle maybe?
Marcia, who takes up the "I don't like this place" role early in the film, phones up the local real estate agent. He gets seriously injured when he tours the house when one of the attic steps disappear while he climbed them. The kids "neh neh neh neh neh" laugh at his possible paralyzing accident with glee...no good little bastards.
A few nights later the kids are visited by two small flames in the middle of the night. The kids play with the flames which unfortunately don't expand and burn them alive. Rather they simply just burn out and go away.
In the next few scenes we get acquainted with a dude named Guido. He was Roberto and Mary's gardener who also doubled as their murderer. Motive? Never explained. What was he trying to get his hands on in the safe? Never explained. Why did I bother keep watching the movie until this point? Can't explain that either.
Well anyhow turns out Guido is the murderer in a rather un-climatic uncovering. After a few odd visions he decides to quit the estate but returns only to get assaulted by an unseen force. This leads him to walk down the road to the house saying stuff about the murder and church bells. I�m assuming he was a relative of Quasimodo or something.
While he struts along he has flashbacks to the murders. Now remember me saying something about a major continuity error a few paragraphs ago. While he has a flashback about him pushing the car down the hill, its painfully obvious even to a blind viewer that there is no one in the car tumbling down the hill. Maybe their bodies jumped out when the say the imminent danger or something.
Sigh...moving on...after successfully recapping the first 15 minutes of the film to kill time, out of nowhere a dog jumps at Guido which somehow turns into a truck. I guess its easy to mistake those two seeing they both look so much alike...um yeah.
Ok, so if you didn�t have enough questions about the plot yet, don�t worry. The next bit makes little to no sense either. The kids conjure up some voodoo hoodoo crap to resurrect their fallen parents and their dead dog. Perhaps they should have summoned Shakespeare to write a better script for this film while they were at it.
They walk about like ninnies until they get assaulted by a bright light in the house�s attic. They complain about, as Manfred Mann�s Earth Band talked about, being blinded by the light. I figured they could have helped this by either turning away or trying the brilliant idea of closing their eyes. Well not to worry anyhow, out of nowhere Roberto and Mary come back from the afterlife to hang out with their kids.
So, you figure with two free ghostly babysitters and tons of free time on their hands that Marcia and Carlo would have it made. Well they start to think the kids are going mad because they can�t see Roberto and Mary. Much like how Mr. Snuffleupagus was only seen by Big Bird for awhile. They call in the help of an eccentric exorcist who challenges them quite unsuccessfully.
The...um...big climax comes when the real estate agent, exorcist and two foster parents (that sounds like the start of a bad �walk into a bar� joke by the way) come with a piece of machinery to knock down the house. Roberto and Mary cause chaos which weakens them. The exorcist then forces their spirits out of the house which inhabit glowing rocks outside the house. The children pick them up and when the exorcist grabs one of them his hand melts. The kids laugh at such a wonderfully painful site and the movie ends.
Fulci indeed has left the world with many great films. Sadly this was not one of them. The film has some of the classic Fulci gore but it simply comes off more or less as misused. The characters are completely annoying and lack any kind of interest. The plot, well lets just forget about that.
In other words, opposite to what Peter Griffin would say this �house� is not �frickin� sweet�.
1.) Garden Worm - Guido the gardener brutally beats Roberto and Mary�s head in and then in turn gets run over by a truck. Isn�t there an unwritten rule about hiring a guy named �Guido� established somewhere?
1.) Marco and Sarah: Roberto and Mary just didn�t realize how Bermuda-like limbo was compared to hanging out with these little f*ckers.
2.) Guido: The odd job guy who ends up killing Mary and Roberto over something in a safe. Maybe it was proof that Marco and Sarah were his kids? Hes a gardener with a motive by that point.
3.) The Exorcist: Rumored to be currently working with Richard Burton against Pazuzu somewhere in Africa.
