The Sweet House of Horrors
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
- Release Date: 1989 (intended release date)
- Directed by: Lucio Fulci
- Written by: Vincenzo Mannino, Gigliola Battaglini and Lucio Fulci
- Runtime: 1 hour 22 minutes
Immediately after the completion of filming for The House of Clocks, Lucio Fulci filmed his second direct-to-television film, The Sweet House of Horrors. Intended as part of the same Houses of Doom package, the movie remained unaired and unreleased for many years until finally finding a DVD release in the early 2000s. After so many horror films featuring graphic physical violence in various ways, this movie was Fulci's attempt to explore the haunted house subgenre. I was really surprised at how good The House of Clocks was for being such a low-budget effort, so I was hoping that The Sweet House of Horrors would deliver a similar amount of entertainment and end up being another hidden gem of Italian horror. Sadly, that just wasn't the case. This one's a bit of a stinker.
The movie opens with a husband and wife who are brutally murdered by a home intruder who dumps their bodies in a car, leaving their two children orphaned. When the wife's sister and husband take guardianship of the children and move into the family house, the spirits of the parents begin to haunt the house in an attempt to protect the kids from people who want to take them away. The only good thing that I can think to mention about this movie is the opening murder sequence, which is pretty graphic for a television film. The father gets his face bludgeoned in, while the mother gets the Fulci trademark of her eyeballs being beaten out. While the gore effects are noticeably cheaper than normal, they're a pretty eye-catching (no pun intended) way of opening the movie. There is one other notable gore sequence where a character's skin bubbles and oozes blood, and the effect is pretty well-executed for such a limited budget. That's about where the positives end though, as they're massively overshadowed by so many shortcomings that kill any momentum that was built up early on.
Being produced immediately after The House of Clocks and for the same TV package, I assume that this movie had about the same budget to work with. Somehow, this thing makes The House of Clocks look like a theatrical release. The film stock is incredibly blurry, and while I know that the DVD release I have is pretty outdated at this point, the quality is such a step down that it looks like it was made for half the cost of Clocks. Aside from the visual quality, the audio quality is exceptionally poor. Dubbing is extremely common for Italian horror films, but this movie features some of the worst dubbing I've heard for so many characters. Both of the children have incredibly unconvincing voices, and sound like they're being dubbed by adults trying to act like kids. I normally wouldn't mind something like that, but their acting just sounds like they're reading lines off a script in the same way they would read a book out loud in class. In fact, the son's voice sounds remarkably similar to Tommy from Extra-Terrestrial Visitors, which did give me some laughs throughout. The funniest dub moment comes from a real estate agent, whose voice seems to turn into Bobcat Goldthwait when he gets hurt in one scene. Bad dubbing can add a lot of entertainment value to a movie, but this one just felt straight-up lazy compared to how Clocks sounded.
The budgetary setbacks don't stop at just the visual or audio quality. One scene that appears far too early in the film reveals who killed the children's parents, and to remind you of what he did, the movie plays the exact same opening scene footage for a second time. There are a few shots added to show you the killer's face, but aside from those, it's just an obvious reuse of footage to pad out the movie's runtime. The finale features the ghosts possessing an excavator to stop the demolition of the house, and to show how crazy the machine is acting, the footage is simply sped up. Normally a shortcut like this would be understandable, but when the characters in the background are moving around like people in a silent film, it's just so distracting and cheap-looking. Almost every aspect of this movie is compromised by its lack of money, and while I'm sure Fulci was trying as hard as he could with what he had, the end result is just a sad thing to watch.
The Sweet House of Horrors is the first film in Fulci's sickness era where I think his illnesses were definitely impacting his filmmaking abilities. While watching it, I had to keep reminding myself that he made Aenigma only two years prior, as the decline in quality is so sharp here. I don't want to trash the man for turning in a bad project while having to deal with sickness, but this is one that I just can't recommend unless you're a die-hard completionist. It is slightly more entertaining than Manhattan Baby just for its cheap oddities, but this one is definitely a bottom-tier entry in his filmography.