Sodoma's Ghost
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- Release Date: November 1988
- Directed by: Lucio Fulci
- Written by: Lucio Fulci and Carlo Alberto Alfieri
- Runtime: 1 hour 24 minutes
After leaving the set of Zombi 3 and battling worsening illnesses, Lucio Fulci was offered to work on a series of direct-to-video horror films. Sodoma's Ghost was his first non-theatrically released horror film, and marks the beginning of what I think of as his "sickness era." This era would sadly last the remainder of his directing career, and saw the director working with miniscule budgets and short shooting schedules. The movie was one that he never intended on directing, but ended up doing so once the original director dropped out of the project. What do you get when you give an ailing master of horror barely any money and have him direct a film that he didn't want to? The answer is... a pretty uneven experience.
The movie focuses on an old house in the middle of nowhere, where Nazi officers once partook in orgies and drug binges before being bombed. Years later, a group of traveling friends find the house once their car breaks down, and they decide to stay there. The ghosts of the Nazis then begin to torment and pick off the friends one by one. Right off the bat, it's obvious that Fulci had very little money to work with on this movie. The quality of the film feels very cheap, and even though I watched this on a VHS source, I doubt that any sort of HD restoration would make this thing look much better. There is also a heavy usage of cheap effects, such as dissolve cuts between shots to make characters or objects appear or disappear. Despite these shortcomings, I do enjoy how this thing plays out. The first big chunk of the movie comes across like the house itself is messing with our characters. It locks its doors and blocks the windows to keep them inside, and even teleports the characters back to it when they do manage to escape. The protagonists also begin to act in oddly sexual and violent ways, and it feels like the evil past of the house is starting to seep into the characters and turn them into the monsters who used to party there. It's not until the second half of the movie that the ghosts themselves get involved in the plot, and when they do, they really only feature in a handful of scenes. I almost wish that the ghosts had remained completely unseen, and instead manipulated the characters to do horrific things to each other.
There are a couple of highlights that this movie has to offer. One scene features a protagonist sitting down at a table with one of the Nazi ghosts to play a game. Each person draws cards, and if the Nazi draws the higher card, then the protagonist has to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger three times. Russian roulette scenes usually get me on edge, but the card game adds an extra layer of suspense on top of that. The drawing of the cards features this high-pitched music that adds some nice tension to the scene, and when it comes time for the gun to be used, the music fades to silence to emphasize the click of the trigger. It's a great little usage of sound, and I was surprised to find myself feeling tense during the scene. Another highlight is a character's corpse as he begins to rot. The characters have to leave him in a room since they can't escape, and over the course of several scenes, he decomposes further and further until his flesh is bubbling and oozing all over the place. It's the one part of the movie that features Fulci's trademark graphic gore effects, and for such a low budget production, they don't look bad at all.
Sadly, after those highlights, the movie decides to end with one of the most overused and cliched twist endings that could possibly be used. SPOILER: everything turns out to be a dream as the characters are passed out in front of the bombed house. Part of me wonders if that was the original intended ending, as the pacing seems incredibly off. Before the ending happens, only two characters are dead and the Nazi ghosts seem to be swarming the others. It took most of the movie for the ghosts to even appear, and they only take up about twenty minutes of screen time, if that. It feels like two or three more scenes could have been shot to raise the body count, but for all I know, they may not have even had the money to come up with anything else.
Before I watched this movie, I read that Lucio Fulci considered this to be the worst movie that he made. I honestly don't think that that's true. The movie does suffer from a low budget, uneven pace, and a bullshit cop-out ending. But it is interesting to see Fulci having to operate within the confines of a direct-to-video movie and still deliver some interesting scenes with a slight level of suspense. Sodoma's Ghost is nowhere near a masterpiece in his filmography, but it's certainly more entertaining than something like Manhattan Baby. That may seem like an incredibly low bar, but it is what it is.