The House of Clocks
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- Release Date: 1989 (intended release date)
- Directed by: Lucio Fulci
- Written by: Gianfranco Clerici, Daniele Stroppa and Lucio Fulci
- Runtime: 1 hour 23 minutes
About a year after completing the direct-to-video films Sodoma's Ghost and Touch of Death, Lucio Fulci moved into the realm of television. He and fellow Italian filmmaker Umberto Lenzi were approached to direct two films each for a four-film television package called Houses of Doom. While all four films were made and finished for a 1989 release, they were supposedly deemed too graphic to be shown on TV. The films were never aired and remained largely unavailable until the early 2000s, when they were finally given a home media release on DVD. The House of Clocks was the first film that Fulci made for Houses of Doom. Coming off of two direct-to-video films that ranged from mid to pretty entertaining, I was curious to see how he would handle the constraints of a TV budget and censorship. With all of that working against him, he still managed to turn in a pretty entertaining flick!
The movie follows a group of three petty criminals who decide to rob a house that is home to an elderly couple who has a dark past and murderous tendencies. When the robbery goes awry and the couple is killed, time begins to run backwards in the house, causing dead people to return to life and hunt down the trapped robbers. This is the first film in Fulci's sickness era where some of the surreal nature of his early horror films makes a small resurgence. The exact motivations of the elderly couple and how the house is able to control time are never clearly explained, but the lack of explanation makes the story so much more fun. Like some of his best films such as City of the Living Dead or The Beyond, it works best if you simply sit logic aside, kick back, and enjoy the ride. You have people returning to life with a vengeance to settle, unexplained dogs guarding the outside of the house, and a few lethal traps waiting to be sprung. The three main characters are all very unlikable, so it's pretty entertaining to watch them get tormented and picked off in these weird ways.
Compared to how simple and limited the settings for Sodoma's Ghost and Touch of Death were, The House of Clocks feels a little bigger and more flashy in terms of presentation. Not only are there some beautiful countryside shots, but the house itself is just a great location to look at. It's a large mansion filled with old clocks and antique furniture / fixtures, and the entire thing is decked out with a higher-class touch. Many scenes feature tight corridors and narrow, winding staircases that add a bit of claustrophobia to some of the chase sequences. There is also a little bit of brightly-colored lighting used in a couple of scenes, with flashes of bright red and yellow that add to the haunted house atmosphere.
I mentioned before how the movie was never broadcast on TV for being too violent, and I really was surprised at how much carnage was packed into a movie like this. There are impalings with stakes complete with the spilling of entrails, multiple shotgun blasts to the body, the stabbing of a hand that causes a large blood splatter, and numerous other bits of gore. I'm not entirely sure how television censorship worked in Italy at the time, but you would think that some producer would have told Fulci that he should probably tone down the violence for the TV market. I'm glad they didn't, though. Not only does the bloodshed make the movie even more entertaining, but the thought of him delivering his trademark gore to be broadcast to the masses is a very funny thought to me.
There are a couple of criticisms that I could make if I really had to. The low budget of the film shows every now and then. Like his previous direct-to-video films, this was also shot on 16mm film instead of 35mm, and the cheap film stock looks pretty fuzzy sometimes. There are also a few points where the characters' movement appears to be too fast. If you've ever watched a daytime soap opera where the camera speed feels too smooth, that same effect happens in quite a few scenes here. However, those are minor nitpicks, as none of these flaws took away from how entertaining I found this movie to be.
The House of Clocks was a really nice surprise. I had always heard that Fulci's post-sickness films were wildly uneven, but I thought this movie was a lot of fun, even more so than Touch of Death. If it was given a larger budget and a theatrical release, I could see it being on par with something like Aenigma. It doesn't reach the heights of the Gates of Hell films, but it still delivers enough originality and unpredictable scares to be a worthy addition to any fan's collection.