Ghosthouse

Alternate titles : La Casa 3

Tagline : "A terrifying journey into the world of the supernatural"

One of many low budget Italian horrors made in the late 80s after the market dropped out of the Italian film industry and various directors were knocking out these rather bland "chillers" at even lower budgets than before, for the Italian TV and home video markets.

This particular tale takes place in Massachusetts in the US, where a young Ham radio operator picks up a bizarre radio transmission of what sounds like someone being attacked and screaming for help.

Tracing the signal to a house some miles away, he finds the operator sounds just like one of the people he heard, but insists it couldn't have been him as he had only just finished setting up the ariel and hadn't broadcast anything yet.

Unfortunately, as they try to investigate where this signal may have come from, they find themselves being menaced by the ghost of a young girl and her creepy clown doll.

There's also a couple of red herrings, like a hitchhiker who likes playing jokes with horror props on people (think Shelly from Friday the 13th Pt3) and some old nutter played by Italian regular Donald O'Brien, who it seems was a caretaker of sorts for the old property, but doesn't like the arrival of these pesky kids (despite the fact one of them is a relative of the owner).

Ripping off "The Amityville Horror" and "Poltergeist", this was a bit of a slowie and isn't really all that good. Worth a watch if you're a die-hard Italian horror fan, or if you want to see the state of the films Umberto Lenzi (the Cannibal Ferox man) was churning out towards the end of his career, given that he wrote and directed this.

Overall Marks : 3.5/10

Terrifying Trivia

• In Italy, the film was released as "Evil Dead 3" (which was titled "La Casa"/"The House" in that country), even though it had nothing to do with those films.
• The house used in the film was the same building used in Lucio Fulci's "House by the Cemetery" (1981) which is located in a public park, known as the Ellis Estate, in Scituate, Massachusetts.
• Fellow italian Director Joe D'Amato helped co-produce the film.
• Lara Wendell, who plays Martha, also appeared in Dario Argento's "Tenebrae" (1982) playing Maria. She also had one of the lead roles, playing Anne, in "Killing Birds" (1988) (AKA Zombie 5/Raptors).
• Donald O'Brien, who plays Valkos, the creepy house keeper, also played Dr Obrero, the titular "Dr Butcher" from "Zombie Holocaust" (1980). He also appeared in "Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals" (1977), Inglorious Bastards (1978) and The Sect (1991).
• Director Umberto Lenzi wanted to make a series of similarly themed sequels to this, but the distributors decided to go in a different direction. He did however go on to make a series of haunted house films with Lucio Fulci, entitled The Houses of Doom. A couple of which, just to confuse matters, were released as Ghosthouse sequels in Germany.

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