La casa del sortilegio

This was the second to last of a quartet of films, unofficially known as the 'House Quartet', that were made in Italy in 1989. Having seen Lucio Fulci's two efforts - the good House of Clocks and the pretty terrible Sweet House of Horrors - I wasn't going into this one with much hope. It would seem that Lenzi's two efforts in this series aren't as well watched as Fulci's, and based on the strength of this film - it's not hard to see why. Umberto Lenzi definitely had the ability to make good films - his crime flicks are second to none, and most of his Giallo output was pretty good, but towards the end of his career he didn't seem to care much, and this is one of his careless efforts. The film was made for TV, and this is made obvious through the plot, which is entirely mundane and basically follows a man who travels to a house after suffering loads of nightmares. The film doesn't have much going for it; the cinematography is bland, the acting is nothing to write home about and the story didn't deserve a film to be based on it. Here in the UK, this film has a release by the cheapo DVD label 'Vipco' - and it completely fits into their little series as it's such a 'bare bones' film. Overall - not recommended!

The House of Witchcraft (1989)

* (out of 4)

Luke (Andy J. Forest) is having nightmares of an old castle where some strange things are happening. His wife (Sonia Petrovna) decides to get him away from their home for a relaxing vacation but the spot she takes him is the same place from his dreams.

THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT was part of a four film series that was made for Italian television. Two films were directed by Umberto Lenzi and the other two by Lucio Fulci but all four films have a pretty poor reputation and there's no question that this one here was much worse than either of Fulci's. There are all sorts of problems with this movie, which we will get to in a moment but it's clear that the Italian horror genre was in the middle of a very ugly death.

As I said, there are all sorts of problems with this film including the fact that the screenplay is incredibly bland and unoriginal. How many horror films have we seen where someone is haunted by dreams and then they end up at the place they're dreaming about? Lenzi certainly doesn't do anything fresh with the idea and we're left with a very boring story and even more boring characters. There's not a single scare to be had here and what's worse is that the film stays away from any graphic violence or gore.

Both Forest and Petronva are pretty bland in their roles and the only one who really brings anything is Paul Muller who appears in a few scenes. It was great getting to see the Jess Franco regular here but sadly he couldn't even save the picture. THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT is one of the most unoriginal films that I've seen from Lenzi and it's really too bad that it turned out so poor.

This is one of the two films Umberto Lenzi made for the Italian four part TV-series Houses of Doom, Lucio Fulci helming the others. A young man dreams a recurring nightmare, in which he is running away from someone before he's reaching an old house, where an ugly old woman boils his own head in a big kettle. His girlfriend thinks it's good for him to take a few days off and they drive to an old house that belongs to her family. The house is the one the young man always enters in his nightmare...

Even though the production values are rather low-key, this film is really uncanny and sometimes quite disturbing. Lenzi delivers chilling atmosphere, a classic Freudian nightmare and a decent plot about witchcraft and haunted houses. More thrilling than his other film for the series ("La Casa delle Anime Erranti"; Fulci's two films are "La Casa nel Tempo" and "La Dolce Casa degli Orrori"). In short: This film offers an almost old-fashioned witch story that actually works.

House of witchcraft is a movie about a man that comes to the house of his nightmares, strange things happen there. At first I thought it was rather tacky and cheep but after a while I changed my mind and the further the movie went on the more interesting it came.

I would say that it is rather exciting at times, even if there's no big surprises to be delivered.

Since I saw the English dubbed version it's difficult to judge the acting. The dubbing is fair though, but there's no way of knowing if the original dialog was as bad as in this version, a lot of strange "fabricated" sentences if you know what I mean.

6/10

The director Umberto Lenzi sure was fixated about severed heads and used them over and over again in his two TV-movies "The house of lost souls" and "The house of witchcraft". Doing the same thing doesn't do any favors for this film, it's just a fun turkey to watch with clumsy dialogue.

In these two Lenzi films they have people running around and about way too much but there's less of it in this film.

In all its cookiness this film isn't too bad either. It's more like a slasher with a touch of giallo genre but even for a giallo it's executed in a too straightforward way making the plot rather obvious and leaving very little mystery. In a way it's very American kind of film and that's not a good thing at all in my opinion.

Lenzi has done so many better films upon his career than his later works but still this film has got lots of positive things. Visuals, sets and cinematography are all very good for a TV-movie and upon all it didn't seem like the makers had taken it too seriously. They knew exactly what they were doing.

All in all this is better than "House of lost souls" and way better than "Sweet house of horrors". Fulci's "House of Clocks" however is the best of all these four TV-movies.