The Sweet House of Horror (1989)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini

Cast: Jean-Christophe Brétignière as Carlo; Cinzia Monreale as Marcia; Lubka Lenzi as Mary Valdi; Lino Salemme as Guido; Franco Diogene as Mr. Coby; Vernon Dobtcheff as The Exorcist; Giuliano Gensini as Marco; Ilary Blasi as Sarah; Dante Fioretti as Father O'Toole; Pascal Persiano as Roberto Valdi

As expected for a late period Fulci film, this has gore, kicking off with a thief who is discovered in a heterosexual couple's home deciding to silence them in particularly nasty ways, even involving eyeball trauma.

You'd not expect a Fulci film to have a tone closer to a family film after that however, in which their orphaned children, living with their uncle and aunt in the same house, stay in contact with the ghosts of their parents. That certainly leaves the film a difficult one to market, which it proved to be - The Sweet House of Horror was originally part of a planned four part TV anthology of feature length films, two made by Fulci (the second The House of Clocks (1989)) and two by Umberto Lenzi. All of them were deemed inappropriate to show on Italian television and weren't even released in Italian until the 2000s. They did however get worldwide release, as two shot on 16mm films, possibly why we got the benefit of Fulci's two getting UK releases through Vipco, an infamous company who held a banner aloft for Video Nasties in the 90s VHS, lurid TV ads late at night on the Sci-Fi Channel when I was growing up, and films with some exceptions now getting Blu-Ray releases which could even be VHS rips on DVD depending on the title.

The Sweet House of Horror also comes from the last period in Fulci's career before his 1996 death, in which even to the bizarre films he made before in horror, his cinema got stranger and much more difficult to pin down as his late period from the late eighties to nineties when they were not held considerably well at all. This was when A Cat in the Brain (1990) was released, in which he made a meta-film about himself being influenced by the gory horror films he was making using clips from his and others' work from the time. The tone is perfectly encapsulated by the funeral scene, in which the kids, two moppets who could be irritating to many, are sad their father and mother are dead but have been allowed to chew bubblegum throughout and mock the aging priest for his rambling in the sermon. From there they will have to go against a real estate man, mainly by tormenting him and breaking his leg with psychic stair manipulation powers, and a Rasputin-like medium, all whilst the film has this whimsical tone about them hanging around their parent's ghosts despite the tone suggesting Henry James ' The Turn of the Screw at first.

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These films at this point are difficult to define for their genre in Fulci's career*, particularly as the film is clearly meant to be a whimsical supernatural drama but there's the horror trademarks of his still pronounced throughout, looking like a film of the director's at the time right down to the obsession with fake fog on the set, to the gore which is only a couple of times but has his trademark. That, even if incredibly fake, that arguably makes it more disgusting and unsettling in how prolonged and pornographic his gaze at it is against the fake texture of the practical effects. Which is definitely out of place in the tone, where a lot of the film is also clearly meant to play off as comedic or charming - an attempt by the owners to leave the house leads to the car floating in the air with its wheels spinning, a practical effect I will admit I wonder how they pulled off, to the delight of the kids when the car's turned back. Even when the kids try to communicate to the dead and use black magic, in trick and treat costumes, it's meant to be light. But the presentation is incredibly jarring.

Tonally coming off like it is originally going to be the ghosts corrupting the children, its instead something curiously odder with the English dub having a sloppier air to it than usual in Italian genre cinema. Beyond this, there is a lot of tangents that are dishevelled in placement furtger. The theft responsible for the original murders does reappear, leading to an Omen-like scenario where Fulci returns to the dog-on-human violence. The buffoonish real estate agent, a complete caricature, is utter hateable but the malice the kids show, permanently damaging one of his legs, raises a lot of questions alongside the fact one of his only really defining properties is that he's overweight and obnoxious. Even our Rasputin-like medium, the true villain of the piece, is only introduced near the end trying to cast the ghosts out, screaming over the top proclamations as he does.

The result isn't an accessible film in Lucio Fulci's filmography at all, only for the diehard fans to which I am one of them. I liked the film, found entertainment in it, but in lieu to the fact that it's a curiosity, its source as a TV film that wasn't even premiered on television as they were planned to be adding to its weirdness. The film is still, in spite of the English dub, to the usual quality of this type of Italian genre film from the period, which in the eighties always had a bit of cheesy exaggeration to it, something of a perverse charm in how (in another scene I would like to know how it was executed) the ghosts appear to their children in bed as lit flames. The film altogether is peculiar to say the least, sometimes an unintentional joy, other times a head scratcher. And the surprise is knowing there were many more films like this and, even before his final period, films like City of the Living Dead (1980) were already weird; he was dabbling in this even in his seventies work with the likes of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), making this a fascinating progression when a genre to hang around his work disappeared entirely. (Try watching Conquest (1983), his sole swords and fantasy film, for an example of where genre gets distorted into his vision rather than the other way around). This is admittedly not a good place to start for this late era, but for me, it was an interesting experience to say the least.

Abstract Spectrum: Tonal Whiplash/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None):  None

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* Touch of Death (1988), which I've covered on the blog and had footage used in A Cat in the Brain, was an incredibly weird film I do actually recommend tracking down from this era.