Director: Umberto Lenzi
Year: 1988
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: La casa 3
Genre: Haunted House
Plot:
Working with a radio receiver, a guy who keeps receiving strange transmissions tracks the source to a small-town house in the country and finds a group of friends living in the house where they discover the house is haunted by the spirit of a young girl who murdered her grandparents’ years ago.
Review:
This was a really nice supernatural entry. One of the best facts is that there's a great ability to remain so creepy while it's so cheesy. The main house where everything takes place is incredibly creepy, with the basement set-up, the decorations placed down there and the way that they’re set-up makes this a wonderful setting. From the great method of letting the main hauntings get started with the demonic-looking clown that is just down-right creepy because of the twisted smile and the white face paint being involved, it has a never-ending manner of setting up an atmosphere to this that manages to make the real haunting scenes all the better.
These haunting scenes are some of the film’s other great aspects with the slow-burning build that slowly traps them in the house. Her encounter in the basement with the exploding lights and the severed head in the washing machine gets this off to a great start, as is the first night where everyone gets attacked in great scenes in the basement or the rocking camper that comes into play. The scene in the bedroom with the dolls coming to life and the last assault on the friends stuck inside when they return to the house are even better, from the howling wind to the really great method of the supernatural instances coming to life and the simply incredible scene where the hooded figure comes down the stairs carrying a knife, and it's revealed to be a skull-headed grim reaper with the bony features melting down. It's a great scene and combined with the great deaths which are really nice and bring about some nice gore, these here are all the really good parts of this.
There really isn't all that much wrong with this one. The main aspect of this one is the film's incredibly slow burn to get going. There's some nice stuff early on, but the film takes it's time to get to the great areas that occur in the second half. The encounter with the hitchhiker who disappears after a couple minutes, the long walk-through of the house when they first arrive, and especially the scenes of him playing around with the noise transmissions are full of scenes that go on for a long time before they lead into anything of excitement, which really works here to make the first half a little slow-going.
The only other flaw in this one, which is rather big but non-detrimental, is the middle section that moves the film away from the house to focus on the investigations of the houses’ inhabitants. Going outside the house to the scenes of the two running around town investigating everything gives the film rather weird pacing where it focuses on hauntings immediately, stops to look into the house’s history and then returns to it at the end to rescue their stranded friends who are still there. This ends up leaving the entire sequence in the cemetery running from the handyman to be incredibly atmospheric if oddly fitted into the film’s narrative. It's a really big problem there, and while it's not the most impacting on the film does hold it back with the other issues.
Overview: ***.5/5
This one ended up being a rather enjoyable entry that really has a lot to like about it with only a few mild flaws to bring the film down. Give this a shot if you're into creepy haunted house films, a big fan of European horror fare or the creative cast or just plain interested, while those who aren't into this type should heed caution.
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