Cannibal Holocaust has always been a movie that by reputation that I’ve avoided. It’s been tagged as “the one that goes all the way” and has been banned in over fifty countries. And it isn’t every movie that gets confiscated ten days after its premiere with the director arrested and charged with obscenity.

By January 1981, thanks to the French magazine Photo, authorities believed that the deaths in the film were indeed real, playing into the urban legend of the snuff film. The charges against director Ruggero Deodato (The House on the Edge of the Park, Raiders of Atlantis) now included murder.

The problem was that the actors playing the film crew had been paid for an entire year to disappear. That way, the public would believe that the “found footage” in the film was indeed real snuff footage. Sometimes, a PR idea works too well. Deodato had to gather three of the actors and explain how the film was simply a horror movie and the effects, even the grisly impaling scene near the close of the film, were fake. He even provided imagery of the actress in that scene joking around after the filming.

Deodato also explained in court how the impalement scene was faked: a bicycle seat was attached to the end of a pole, upon which the actress sat. She then had the rest of the pole in her mouth and looked up to complete the effect. Deodato also gave the court photos of the girl interacting with the crew after the scene had been filmed.

The murder charges were dropped, but the roughest part of the film — animal cruelty — remain. Today, Deodato condemns his past actions, in which six animal deaths appear onscreen. This mixture of the real — animals — and unreal — humans — lends itself to the frightening fact that it’s nearly impossible to separate what is fact and fiction here. I’m not justifying it. In fact, I hate that these scenes are in the movie, because I find them completely unnecessary to the plot. The film would be just as rough and brutal without them. The same message of man’s inhumanity to man, despite civilization, would remain. 

Let’s get into it. And again, let me warn you. This movie is not pretty.

An American film crew that was filming the indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforests has disappeared. They are Alan, the director; his girlfriend, Faye; and the cameramen, Jack and Mark. Deodato cast these roles with inexperienced actors from the Actors Studio in New York City. They’d be able to speak English, as he saw the film having an international scope. And they were unknown, which would help when it came to the legitimacy of the snuff angle. However, Mark (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) and Faye (Francesca Ciardi) were cast so that the film because they were Italian speakers (to ensure that the film would be recognized as being covered by Italian law).

Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman who was also in Eaten Alive! and several pornographic films under his stage name, R. Bolla) is an anthropologist at New York University who agrees to lead a rescue team. Through his adventures, he meets the Yacumo tribe and learns that the documentary crew caused create hostility amongst the native population. Heading deeper into the “green inferno” (the original name for the film, as well as the title of Eli Roth’s 2015 film), he encounters two warring tribes, the Ya̧nomamö and the Shamatari. They encounter a group of Shamatari warriors and follow them to a riverbank, where they save a smaller group of Ya̧nomamö from death. The Ya̧nomamö invite Monroe and his team back to their village

In gratitude for saving the Ya̧nomamö, the elders incite Monroe and his team back to their village. To gain their trust, Munroe bathes nude in a riverbank with the female natives. They then take him to a shrine filled with the rotting bodies of the original crew. He trades his tape recorder for the film that Alan captured. The elders only have one final request: he must dine with them and consume human flesh.

We return to civilization. New York City to be precise. The network execs at the Pan American Broadcasting System want Monroe to host a broadcast of the recovered footage, but he wants to watch it to be sure. Watching Alan’s last documentary, The Last Road to Hell, he watches executions and violence in several war-torn countries, only to later learn that much of this footage was staged. Deodato came up with this angle while discussing the way the Italian media shared news coverage of the Red Brigades. He felt that the reports were sensationalistic, decrying violence while promoting it. He also felt that there was no way they could have obtained their footage without staging the camera angles.

Monroe then watches the real footage. This is the part of Cannibal Holocaust that I would endorse — that it deliberately plays with the way that we consume media, forcing the viewer to rewind and rewatch. Every time that we feel that we’ve escaped the horrors of the jungle, we are doomed to return, to see the real story beneath the gloss, the gore behind the smiles.

A crew follows the friends and family of the dead documentarians. We learn banal moments of their lives, see that even their own wives and fathers hated them. There’s a really strange moment where a nun is interviewed while children look completely horrified to have strangers in their midst. This footage is just as unsettling as the gore on a much more emotional level.

The real truth? The documentary crew were worse than anything they’s find in the Amazon. The crew burned down the set, not another tribe. He’s seen the footage and demands that it never be aired, but the higher-ups refuse.

That’s when Munroe pulls out his trump card: the unedited footage, which only he has seen. The men attack and rape a native girl, despite Faye’s protests. They find that same girl impaled on a wooden pole in punishment for the loss of her virginity. The Ya̧nomamö return to get revenge for the girl, hitting Jack with a spear, at which point Alan shoots him so that his cameras can record the natives eating him). Faye is captured and Alan debates saving her, but decides that he would rather have the footage of her being raped, beaten and beheaded. Finally, the natives find Mark and Allen as the camera drops to the floor, revealing Alan’s blood covered face.

Then, and only then, do the executives demand that the film be destroyed. The end credits try and play into the snuff angle one more time: “Projectionist John Kiroy was given a two-month suspended jail sentence and fined $10,000 for illegal appropriation of film material. We know that he received $250,000 for that same footage.”

Supposedly, this is a reference to another inspiration Deodato had, as an Italian network was putting together a real documentary about a real crew who was lost in the real Amazon and its real cannibals. The documentary, showing incidents he depicted in the film, was destroyed after its discovery. An Italian cable network claimed it had a copy and was going to show it uncut. It never showed the film, but supposedly their copy of the original was screened by a distributor (John Kiroy?) for Deodato. This sounds like the kind of stories that Rosemary’s Baby producer William Castle cooked up after the film was made.

Stories like that seem to be a trend when you discuss Cannibal Holocaust.

Like the actor who played Alan, Carl Gabriel Yorke, who claimed that Francesca Diardi, who played Faye, wanted to skip rehearsal and actually have sex. She claims that their love scene in the film was actual sex and that they were off-screen lovers. I’ve also heard that she objected to the film’s sexual content and wouldn’t bare her breasts until Deodato dragged her off set and screamed at her.

Or that the actor who played Miguel lost his father the day they shot the discovery of the shrine. Production stopped so that he could attend the funeral, but in that scene, when he cries, those are real tears.

If you read the stories online about the actual making of the film, it’s hard to tell where the false camera crew’s antics and the real moviemaker’s begin and end.

In an interview on the Grindhouse Releasing DVD of the film, Yorke says that the set had “a level of cruelty unknown to me.” Kerman claims that Deodato had no remorse and that they’d get into long arguments throughout the shoot, with the actor claiming that the director was sadistic to people who couldn’t answer back to him. He also walked off the set, refusing to be part of the animal cruelty.

Even the pay was messed up. Yorke was paid less than promised and in Columbian pesos, no less, before threatening to quit. And the native extras are said to have gone unpaid.

Another question in my head: How much of this film was inspired by Gualtiero Jacopetti and his cycle of mondo films, like Mondo Cane, Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom. I think Deodato tips his hand toward this influence by using the music of Italian composer Riz Ortolani, whose song “More” was featured in Mondo Cane (it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1963). Ortolani’s soundtrack is, well, the best part of the film. The opening song is gorgeous and lush, with only a subtle hint that all will not be well.

It’s hard to truly believe in the “who are the real animals” narrative when it seems like Deodato learned none of those lessons for himself. Still, I feel that films should challenge you and push you and make you think. I wouldn’t recommend this film. I’m not upset that I watched it. But I know how people are about having their sensibilities threatened and this is a film that will bleed, puke and piss all over them before eating the remains.

Nevertheless, if you want to watch it for yourself, you can always find it right here on Shudder.

Pre-credits disclaimer: The following feature is one of the most violent films ever made. There are at least two dozen scenes of barbaric torture and sadistic cruelty graphically shown. If the presentation of disgusting and repulsive subject matter upsets you, please do not view this film. For the rest of us, let’s watch something awesome and laugh at those babies who skipped out!

Make Them Die Slowly. With an alternate title like that, you know what you’re getting into here. You’re getting into Umberto Lenzi’s (Eaten Alive!, Spasmo, Man from Deep River, Eyeball) dark and depraved voyage into the world of cocaine-addled maniacs battling cannibals. Beware.

Considered to be “the most violent film ever made” and “banned in 31 countries,” Cannibal Ferox is packed with both simulated and real violence (the credits should probably read animals were harmed during the filming of this motion picture). It’s all about a gang of malcontents who make the dumb mistake of not only going into the jungle, but fucking with the wrong people.

In New York City, Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, City of the Living Dead, Stagefright) is on the run from the mob, as he owes them $100,000.

Meanwhile, in Paraguay, brother and sister Rudy and Gloria (Lorraine De Selle, Emanuelle in America) and their friend Pat (Zora Kerova, The New York Ripper) are heading into the rainforest. Gloria has a theory that cannibalism is a myth and wants to prove it. They run into Mike and his partner Joe, who have run afoul of some cannibals. Soon, Gloria goes missing and everyone starts to look for her.

Soon, Mike’s having sex with Pat, doing coke and trying to get her to rape a native girl, as you do. She can’t do it, so Mike kills the girl as Joe reveals — as he dies — that they were responsible for making the cannibals go wild as the result of exploiting them for emeralds and cocaine. Turns out killing and torturing natives isn’t new to Mike!

After Joe dies, the cannibals find and consume his body while everyone is captured and forced to watch Mike get tortured and beaten. Back in New York City, the mobsters are still looking for Mike, along with the cops (who include Lt. Rizzo among the number, who is played by Robert Kerman, a former porn actor who also appeared in Cannibal Holocaust and Eaten Alive!)

Rudy tries to escape, but he is caught in a trap in the jungle and attacked by piranhas before the natives kill him with a poison dart.

Pat and Gloria are put in a hole while Mike is in a cage. A native man tries to help the women escape, as Pat had saved him after the virgin was killed. However, Mike fucks it all up for everyone and runs into the jungle to escape. The natives slice his hand off and recapture him. And then they show off their brains, as they tell a search and rescue party that the outsiders all died after a crocodile attack.

Gloria can only bear witness to Pat being hung by her breasts until she is dead and Mike’s skull being cracked open and eaten. The native who tried to help before now frees Gloria and they run through the desert before another trap kills him. Luckily, Gloria finds some trappers who rescue her. She tells them the same story as the natives: everyone else was killed by crocodiles.

Once Gloria returns to New York, she writes a book that supports her theory and continues the lies called Cannibalism: End of a Myth.

This movie is a fine piece of cannibal filth, but is tainted by the real animal deaths. Giovanni Lombardo Radice objected and refused to participate, leading Lenzi to say, “De Niro would do it.” Radice replied, “De Noro would kick your ass all the way back to Rome.” The stand-in who did the actual killing was cut so badly that he almost severed a main artery, which Radice looked at as karma. I agree.

Ready to puke? Then turn on Shudder and get the flesh feast started!

You can also enjoy High Rising Productions’ Calum Waddell’s documentary Eaten Alive! The Rise and Fall of the Italian Cannibal Film (2015), which is featured on the Grindhouse Releasing Blu-ray for Cannibal Ferox in the U.S. and the U.K. Blu-ray for Zombi Holocaust by 88 Films. Our much adored Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Sergio Martino, along with actress Me Me Lai offer their genre insights for the documentary.

You’d think I’d be done with House. Personally, I wish I’d stopped watching these movies with La Casa 3, because I have struggled through each of these. I’m nothing if not a completist and not watching one last film — after running the movie marathon that these films have become — shouldn’t be too bad, right?

Roger Cobb (William Katt, reprising his role from the first film for as long as it takes to get his paycheck) is now married to someone named Kelly and they have a daughter named Laurel. There’s no mention of his first wife, Sandy, or his son Jimmy. They visit the old Cobb house after Roger’s father dies — this must be a side universe, the universe where no one gives two shits about continuity — and have to deal with Burke, the stepbrother who keeps trying to get Roger to sell out on his promise to their father to never sell the house.

This isn’t the actual house from House, so that’s already a strike against this one. But if the interior of the house looks familiar to you, that’s because the same sets were used in The People Under the Stairs.

Were you excited to see William Katt? Well, he dies around five minutes in, the victim of a car crash that leaves his daughter in a wheelchair — the kind of wheelchairs that old ladies roll around in and leave in their bedrooms to haunt you (see Burnt Offerings). Like do they even make wicker wheelchairs any more? This also holds true for The Changeling!

Burke has the mafia making him try and take the house, as they want to dump illegal waste there. Their leader is a little person who needs a machine to remove all of the phlegm in his throat, I shit you not.

Roger is still in the house and various magical Native Americans are kindly enough to protect Roger’s family. Oh yeah — Denny Dillon, who was on HBO’s Dream On and the disastrous Jean Doumanian produced season of Saturday Night Live is in this as a maid.

I like one scene in here a lot, where snakes take over the minds of two mafia guys and they see one another as human snakes. The practical effects are great here, yet wasted for what’s a really quick scene.

There’s also a pizza that comes to life and sings a song before being tossed in a trash compactor. This scene is Troll 2 level inanity and stupidity. It’s also one of the few good parts of this slog of a motion picture.

PS – That’s Kane Hodder’s face in the pizza.

This is one of the late 80’s/early 90’s movies that has no real handle on when it should be a comedy and when it should be horror. If it was an Italian film, that would be forgiven because there’d be loads of gore.

You’ve seen worse movies — and worse House movies — than House IV. But in a world packed with strange new films to discover and old favorites to enjoy again and again, let me be the one to do the watching for you. You don’t really need to see this.

If you want to see it for yourself, Arrow recently put this out, along with some great box art. You can grab it at Diabolik DVD.

Are you ready to be further confused by the House and La Casa numbering and naming structure? The Horror Show had been financed through pre-sales of foreign distribution rights using the title House III. By the time filming began, the film was definitely going to be part of the series, then United Artists thought that The Horror Show was a better title for the U.S.

OK. Makes sense so far, right? But when House IV came out in 1992, many of us couldn’t remember there being a House 3. And with the internet in its infancy, not many of us knew that The Horror Show was also La Casa 6 in Italy. Confused yet?

It gets worse. The Horror Show is about a killer named Meat Cleaver Max, played by Brion James, who is sentenced to the electric chair and dies. But wait — he’s made a deal with the devil and comes back to haunt the cop who put him away — as well as that policeman’s family — with supernatural powers.

There are also some character actor appearances — Lewis Arquette (father of the Arquette family of actors) and Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs). But this movie feels the weight of the late 80’s push for movies to be sequelized, in the same way that Shocker felt like it was made to set up a franchise.

But wait — isn’t that the same plot as 1989’s Shocker with Horace Pinker making a deal with the devil to come back and haunt the football player who helped capture him? Yes. You are 100% correct. The same year, The First Power had the same exact storyline, too! You could also point to 1987’s Prison and 1988’s Destroyer as having similar concepts, but The Horror Show/House 3/La Casa 6 and Shocker go beyond that and feel like the same exact movie (except for the pop culture elements that Craven injected into his take as he tried to create a new Freddy).

And again — this has nothing to do with the two House movies that came before, which have nothing to do with each other either, other than the title. Whew!

Let’s just get to the movie, where Meat Cleaver Max escapes and frames Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen, Near Dark) for a new series of crimes and haunts the house where his family lives. Only a parapsychologist can help them now.

Of course , everything ends up happy. Of course, the cat survives. Of course, they get a 5-year supply of chili at the end. What?!? Seriously — I regret the time I spent watching The Horror Show and that doesn’t happen all that often. I’m not the only one embarrassed. Noticeably in the opening credits, Allyn Warner is credited as Alan Smithee. I love that they spelled Allan Smithee — the pseudonym when someone wants their name taken off a movie — incorrectly.

Want to see The Horror Show? Shout! Factory has you covered, as they’ve released the film to blu-ray. Or you can grab the House 3 version that Arrow Video released at Diabolik DVD. It’s also streaming for free with commercials at VUDU.

Feed Shark

Who better to take on the La Casa franchise — films that are not sequels and are not connected to one another — than the man who made Troll 2, a movie that is not a sequel and is also not about trolls?

Yep. Claudio Fragasso (Monster Dog, Rats: Night of Terror) is in control of your movie watching experience and he’s brought Troll 2 child actor Michael Stephenson along for another ride through the bottom of the movie making barrel.

A priest and his family — right off the bat, you could see that this script has holes you can drive the Landmaster from Damnation Alley through because Catholic priests can’t marry — move into a new house. Bad news for them, good news for us —  it was built over the graves of twenty dead witches.

Their son gets possessed, along with a radio and a meat cleaver. Oh yeah — there’s also the ghost of a female serial killer who wants to eat the souls of children.

And in another of those “they should have known better” moments, this is all filmed in the same building as Fulci’s The Beyond!

If you’re looking for the madcap moments that Troll 2 has, you won’t find them here. This is a more linear and controlled film, except for the crazed performance by David Brandon as Father George, an alcoholic priest whose contact with a demon has made him question his faith. You’ll marvel as he wanders down real city streets with real people — not extras — ranting like a maniac! But what do you expect? He watched a serial killer orgasm in the electric chair surrounded by the trapped spirits of her victims!

Looking for a copy for yourself? Shout! Factory has this on a double disk, along with the George Eastman directed Metamorphosis. You can also watch it on Shudder.

There are moments in Witchery that approach the madcap goofball lunacy of La Casa 3. But you have to really search for them. Just by looking at the cast — Linda Blair! David Hasselhoff! — you think that you’d be in for a much crazier ride. This has even been titled Ghosthouse II, but make no mistake. This ain’t no Ghosthouse.

An angry mob chases a pregnant woman to a house where she dives from a window, like Oliver Reed in Burnt Offerings. I say like because it’s the exact same shot. Jane (Blair) wakes from this dream, which is never explained.

Don’t worry. This movie has no interest in story. And I don’t mean that in a Fulci kind of way, like an absolute film. No, this movie does the things where you’d expect a story to happen and ignores them.

But hey, let’s talk about our heroes. Gary (Hasselhoff) and Leslie are a couple who have decided to head off to an island to do research on witchcraft. They are there because some weird lights show up on the beach. Also — Leslie is a virgin. That’s right. A virgin. It will be mentioned again. And again. And just when you think it’s been mentioned too many times, it will be mentioned again.

Jane’s younger brother and her parents are all coming to the island too. Her parents want to turn it into a club, so they bring the architect, Linda (Leslie Cumming, in her second straight piece of shit on our site after Robowar) and the realtor’s son.

Oh yeah — this method actress went crazy and haunts the island. She kills the boat captain who brings them there to start before killing off the majority of the cast in ways that echo the seven deadly sins for reasons that are never explained. Yes, things like motivation, the hero’s journey and the three-act structure are all ignored by this film. That’s forgivable if crazy shit happens. Sure, there’s demon sex, but it feels like too little, too late (the most out of context sentence I’ve written in 2018!). There’s also a woman impaled on a swordfish and Hasselhoff getting a blood bukkake, so if you just edit down those scenes into a 3 minute or so supercut, this is a much better film. Like this scene, where Hasselhoff discusses his childhood friend.

What blows my mind is that Tommy — the little brother — has a tape recorder that fits into the plot and it’s totally a Sesame Street model. You’d think they’d want their brand to not appear in a movie where a demon’s penis makes a woman’s vagina start bleeding.

Hey look — any movie where David Hasselhoff gets impaled can’t be all bad. But Witchery sure tries. If only it pushed itself to be as deliriously stupid as Troll 2 or as devoted to gore as, well, take your pick of Fulci haunted house films. But you do get a pregnant and possessed Linda Blair — poor Linda — chasing folks around a house before doing a swan dive to her doom.

The end of this film is a shock ending that has nothing to do with anything that came before. A nurse comes in to tell Leslie that Tommy is fine and so is her baby. She answers, “My baby?” The screen loses color and then a totally 80’s schmaltzy love song plays. Seriously, you gotta hear this shit to believe it. It redeems much of the film.

I watched the ending three times in a day to write this and I couldn’t remember any of it. That should either point to how many movies I watch or how uninspiring this film is. Either way, you can decide for yourself and watch it on Shudder. Or order the double disk of this and the vastly superior Ghosthouse at Shout! Factory.

Ghosthouse has nothing to do with House or House 2. Then again, it also has nothing to with Evil Dead or Evil Dead 2, movies that are known as La Casa and La Casa II in Italy. But hey, who is keeping score? As you’ll learn before the end of the week, the next two La Casa movies have nothing to do with this one, either!

Director Umberto Lenzi (Eaten Alive!, Nightmare City) directed this Joe D’Amato production, which was filmed in the same house as Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery!

The film starts in the past, right after Henrietta has killed her pet cat. Her father locks her down in the basement, along with her creepy clown doll. He tells his wife that their daughter has to be possessed by the devil, but before they can make a move, she kills dad with an axe to the head and explodes a mirror, sending shards into the eye of her mother, Fulci style. Holy shit, this movie hasn’t even started yet and it goes for the jugular!

Let’s meet our hero. Paul Rodgers is just your typical guy. He does data entry via ham radio, with his call letters proudly on top of his set-up, made with a wooden router, like something your aunt would have in her house that smells like liver. All he wants to do is sit on the bed and eat chili with his girlfriend, Martha, except he keeps hearing cries for help over the radio.

Also — I should mention that all of the dialogue in this film sounds like it’s being said by complete maniacs, adding to my enjoyment of the film. It also has moments of insane dialogue padding — by that I mean, Paul discussing Simon Le Bon with a female ham operator or asking who is more popular in Denver, Kim Basinger or Kelly LeBrock.

They track the signal to the house we saw at the beginning (throughout the film, I kept yelling, “It’s Dr. Freudenstein’s house! Stay out of his house!” but no one listened) and meet another ham radio operator. Obviously, ham radio was the internet of the 80’s. As they walk on the porch, Martha says that the house has an evil aura (her thick accent makes translating her nonsensical dialogue a master’s class in Italian exploitation dialogue divination) and refuses to go in. Paul just says, “Yeah, fuck it. Fuck. It.” and goes in.

They meet the Dalens, Jim, Mark and Tina, along with Susan. These friends have been interested in the house and Jim may have been the ham radio operation that Paul heard scream. Don’t get too used to anyone — anyone involved dies horribly, like a flying fan blade to the throat, a hammer to the brain, getting chopped in half, being hung and even the basement floor splitting apart to reveal a milky substance that works like acid. Even a wacky hitchhiker who walks through the house looking for silver to steal gets whacked. Man, even Paul gets killed in the film’s shock twist ending as he gets smooshed by a bus.

It’s all Henrietta’s fault. She’s the kid we saw kill her parents earlier and she just keeps it up. Why? Well, her father stole a clown doll from another child’s coffin and gave it to her. You know how these things happen.

There’s a completely deranged scene where Martha finds the doll, leading to paper rabbits, feathers and other toys attacking, ending with the doll sneaking up behind Martha and trying to choke her. Becca yelled, “No wonder this girl turned bad. Her toys are shitty!”

You even get Donald O’Brien (Dr. Butcher M.D. himself!) as Valkos, a hitchhiker/backwoods weirdo/the old guy that warns kids. Here, he stalks and kills at random, including the aforementioned hammer to the head kill, after which he shuts the coffin lid on a still alive mortician.

You like severed heads? You like ghost dogs? You like dialogue about Jack the Ripper and the Salem Witch Trials that makes no sense? You like policemen in over their heads spewing jargon-filled exposition? How do you feel about explosions and maggots? Or synthesized sounds that repeat over and over until they make you feel trapped like the characters in the film? Then guess what? I’ve got the film for you.

In case you didn’t pick it up from the context clues, I love this movie!

It’s actually easy to find, thanks to the Shout! Factory release. And if you subscribe to Shudder, you can find it right here!

Ethan Wiley, who injected the humor into the original House script, returns to direct the sequel, which comes from a story by Fred Dekker that Wiley adapted. If you disliked the comedy in the original film, well, get ready. This one has no interest in being serious.

Prologue: a young couple gives up their child before an undead gunman murders them in their mansion. That baby grows up to be Jesse (Arye Gross, who was the original voice of Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years before Daniel Stern took over), who decides to move back into that house with his girlfriend Kate (Lar Park Lincoln, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood). They’re soon joined by goofball friend Charlie (Jonathan Stark, Fright Night) and his wannabe rock star girlfriend Lana (Amy Yasbeck, who met husband John Ritter on the set of Problem Child).

Jesse has insomnia, which leads to him digging through the basement. He discovers a photo of his great-great-grandfather (Royal Dano, who starred in plenty of cowboy films) standing in front of an Aztec temple with a crystal skull in his hand. In the background is Slim Reeser, his one-time partner turned enemy over the ownership of the skull.

At this point, anyone would be happy to discover this photo and move on with their life. But that’s normal life. Here, Jesse and Charlie decide to dig up his ancestor’s grave to find the skull. Imagine their surprise when Gramps is still alive inside his coffin. Compound that with the fact that he wants to bond with his grandson.

It turns out that the house was built with stones from an Aztec temple and that it contains gateways into other time periods with the skull acting as the remote control, if you will. The forces of evil are drawn to the skull, though, so the boys better be ready to defend it.

Meanwhile, a Halloween party ends up with the boys losing their girls and an appearance by Bill Maher as a record exec. A caveman also attacks the party guests looking for a skull and a baby pterodactyl and a caterpillar-dog come along for the ride.

To compound the film’s weirdness, Bill (John Ratzenberger, who like George Wendt in House was a star on TV’s Cheers) comes to inspect the wiring, but he’s really an adventurer with a sword in his toolbox. He leads the guys through a portal — he’s incredibly nonchalant about the proceedings — and helps them save a virgin who is about to be sacrificed.

During a meal where Jesse embraces his new family — yes, a family that includes a dinosaur and a dog-headed caterpillar — Slim makes his return, rising out of a serving dish. He shoots Gramps, who reveals that this is the man who killed Jesse’s parents. Jesse defeats the evil gunfighter, but can’t save Gramps, who tells him that its time to say goodbye.

The cops come to the house, alerted by all the gunfire, and prepare to fire on Jesse. He uses the skull to go back in time to the Old West, taking his friends and pets with him. The film ends with him burying Gramps and using the crystal skull to make his grave, as he follows the old man’s dying advice and doesn’t become addicted to the skull’s magic.

Interestingly enough, Marvel Comics did an adaption of the film!

House 2 is something else. It’s never sure what kind of movie it wants to be, but it gets so strange that you just feel like you have to go along for the ride. The scenes with Bill are great fun and the ending drama always makes me tear up. And you have to love the caterpuppy.

If you’re confused by the fact that this movie has nothing to do with the original House, the way the movie was released in Italy is going to blow your mind.

The Evil Dead was called La Casa there and Evil Dead II followed that numbering. But as we all know, Italian filmmakers are fond of making their own sequels. That’s what led Joe D’Amato to make La Casa 3, which was released here as Ghosthouse*. Don’t worry — we’ll cover that one tomorrow and it’s well worth the wait.

Two other sequels in name only, La Casa 4 (released in the US as Witchery) and La Casa 5 (Beyond Darkness) followed. Yes, those are coming up this week as well!

So here’s where it gets confusing. Our House 2 is La Casa 6. And The Horror Show, a movie that is pretty much the same film as Shocker, is La Casa 7. But in the US, The Horror Show was sold as House 3, despite having nothing to do with any of the other movies. Huh? What? A final sequel with William Katt reprising his Roger Cobb role would come out in 1992.

You can grab a copy of the great Arrow Video re-release of this film at Diabolik DVD. They also have the box set of the first film, this one and a book about them here.

I totally love how confusing things like this can be. And I love the La Casa series! I can’t wait to share even more of it tomorrow with you!

*Even more confusing — The House of Witchcraft is called Ghosthouse 4.

Feed Shark

Steve Miner has so many cinematic sins to deal with — Soul Man, My Father the Hero, Big Bully (the next to last live action film Rick Moranis would appear in), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later — that you almost forget that he started his career making the second and third installments of Friday the 13th and today’s movie, House.

Roger Cobb (William Katt, Carrie) has some issues. As a Stephen King-ian popular horror writer, he feels fenced in by the horror genre. He has writer’s block. His wife has left him. His son disappeared and no one can find him. And the aunt that raised him just hung herself in the haunted house where he was raised.

Cobb intends his next book to be about what he went through in Vietnam, so he decides to move into the house. His strongest memories involve Big Ben (Richard Moll, fulfilling the contract that either he or Robert Englund appear in every 80’s horror film), a soldier who bullied him back in ‘Nam who was injured and left behind for the enemy to capture.

Everyone’s a fan of Cobb, from his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers) to his real estate agent and the cops that investigate him. He just wants to write. But with all the monsters in his head — and real monsters in the house — that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

Things get worse when his wife visits and turns into a monster, only to be killed by a shotgun blast. At this point, the film flirts with making Cobb the real monster, but it’s a narrative shift that is never followed up on. Then, as he buries his wife, his hot neighbor comes on to him. What he thinks will be a night of hot sex turns out to be him watching her young son, but that goes wrong when little monsters try to steal the kid,

Finally, Cobb falls into his medicine cabinet into an alternate dimension that predates the Upside Down of Stranger Things by several decades. He rescues his son, but not before Big Ben attacks him again. Finally, Cobb realizes that all of his fears are inside his head and he destroys the monster with a grenade before leading the house to find his son and wife, who is magically returned to life.

House was produced by Sean S. Cunningham and featured music by Henry Manfredini, who also worked on the Friday the 13th films. Fred Dekker wrote the original script, but most of the humor is credited to Ethan Wiley.

This is a good example of pre-CGI monster moviemaking. Big Ben looks great, a triumph of practical makeup, as do the creatures that populate the film. And it’s interesting that this movie explores PTSD and the dark side of war years before many were ready to face it.

The look of the film reminds me of late-period Fulci minus the gore. I’m referring to the film stock itself, which doesn’t have much richness, looking more like a TV movie than a theatrical film.

House isn’t a movie that demands that you watch it, but if you’re looking for something in the middle of the night, it always provides a fun distraction. You can’t dislike a film that has a large fish on the wall come to life and try to kill someone. You can watch it on Shudder or grab the original movie from Arrow at Diabolik DVD or the box set of this movie and the sequel.