H P Lovecraft – Missile Test

October Horrorshow: The House by the Cemetery, aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Leave it to Lucio Fulci to make a haunted house flick with lots of gore. Whereas countless filmmakers have used spooky ghosts as an unseen menace, to varying effect, Fulci decided to stick with what he knew, and he knew gore. He also knew convoluted storytelling.

From 1981, Fulci directed The House by the Cemetery from a screenplay by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Fulci, himself. The movie follows the Boyle family: college professor Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco); his wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl); and their young son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza). Fair warning to all potential viewers — Bob is a chore. Missile Test has made it clear how we feel about the talents of child actors, but in this instance, Frezza gets a pass. It’s the awful dubbing that does the most to make Bob one of the more annoying movie children one will see. Anyway… Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The House by the Cemetery, aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero”

October Horrorshow: Color Out of Space

Filmmaker Richard Stanley has had something of a checkered career. His first feature, Hardware, which he wrote and directed, was a success, but he was successfully sued for plagiarism, the story having too many similarities to a strip published in a Judge Dredd annual. Then, a few years later, Stanley was fired as the director of the doomed Island of Dr. Moreau adaptation less than a week into filming (firing him was never going to save that mess of a film, honestly). That was in 1995. It would be more than two decades before Stanley sat in the director’s chair for a feature film again, and it was for 2019’s Color Out of Space, an adaptation of the short story by H.P. Lovecraft. But, the trials and tribulations don’t end there. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Color Out of Space”

October Horrorshow: Re-Animator

Ah, October. The time of year when the leaves change from their electric, yet uniform, green into the vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows that typify the mind’s eye view of a New England landscape, one full of hills cut by a meandering river, the sky a wonderful azure dotted here and there with the softest of clouds. The air grows crisp and the days begin to grow noticeably shorter, but the oppression that is summer is left quickly behind, only a distant memory in the pleasantness of the changing season. It was the Reverend William Newell who once wrote:

Changing, fading, falling, flying,
From homes that gave them birth,
Autumn leaves, in beauty dying,
Seek the mother breast of earth.

Hmm. Makes one think, doesn’t it? I believe it was also Lewis Black who said, back in the far distant days of 1999, “Fall sucks!” Yes, Lewis, yes it does. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Re-Animator”