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Great Film overall

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A murdered couple return from the beyond to care for their two young children, as well as seek revenge against their killer, accept their children's step parents, and try to prevent their house from being sold.So, Lucio Fulci made two television films around 1989. "House of Clocks" is the other one, and sad to say it is the superior one. This film lacks the gore, the horror and the things we typically associate with Fulci. While it tries to build a fantasy world around the children ,it never seems fully successful (though I confess part of my problem was the bad dubbing on the kids).Given the framework Fulci was working in, it is not a bad film, but it is not one of his more memorable and comes off as fairly bland. I would not call this his worst film, but it clearly is not among his best.

Lucio Fulci directed plenty of memorable horror films in his time but sadly this isn't one of them. Made in the late '80s, when Italian genre cinema was pretty much going to the dogs/on its last legs, this is one in a series of four television films centred around haunted houses, and is the worst of the four. It's a shame because it starts off on a good footing, with Fulci at his gory best as he delivers a pair of gory murders that are definitely not for the squeamish: one poor guy has his head caved in while a woman has her eyes popped out with a knife.Weirdly, the film then changes tack entirely and becomes a kid's film! We follow two children as they communicate with their ghostly parents, who are represented by a couple of flying flames superimposed over the screen – effects so bad that similar ones in SPIRITUAL KUNG FU, a Jackie Chan film made a full ten years previously to this, were far superior! Somehow the horror is forgotten about except in a couple of brief moments and instead we're treated to an annoying kiddie fantasy flick, with laboured comedy and no reason to watch.I kept hoping that things would pick up, but aside from a fairly nasty road accident and the hilarious intervention of an exorcist, they don't. Lowlights include a possessed excavator and the worst child acting in movie history (worse than TROLL 2), made even worse by the fact that the English dub has female adults dubbing the voices of the boy and girl actors! Speaking of which, the cast is a diabolical bunch of unfamiliars, aside from the reliable Lino Salemme (the cocaine goon in DEMONS) and Vernon Dobtcheff's engaging exorcist. There really is no reason to watch this non-event of a film, which promises so much and delivers nothing at all. Even in the company of the just-okay other films in the series it falls flat, and I would tell anyone to avoid this boring trash.

Of all the cheaply made films I've ever seen this has the most ludicrous conclusion I've ever seen. I'm not sure if the film ever had any proper script but the way the narrative is bizarrely severed at a point when an adequate conclusion was completely viable indicates that the money had run out. There was no money left to pay for fuel for the digging machine and no money left to pay the actors. There was, however, enough money to pay for a rubber hand and a blowtorch to position out of shot to melt the hand. In the context of what went before this finale there is absolutely no meaning in this moment. At a huge stretch: the power of the spirits of the dead parents of the two (f***ing irritating!) children is so strong that they cannot be driven from the house and this is most aptly manifested by the incredible heat generated by the glowing rocks they are capable of inhabiting. How this proves conclusive is lost on me. The general premise of the film is that the spirits of the couple who are brutally murdered (a gentle head slamming for him; a meticulous face-mashing with some kind of kitchen implement for her) at the beginning are present in their house, now inhabited by their children, an aunt and an uncle. They gradually ramp up their efforts to stop the house being sold to a fat real estate agent (so important he has his own chauffeur-drive Mercedes), exorcised by an extra from Moby Dick or demolished by a swarthy, mulleted Italian in a digger. They do this through various incredible methods, such as moving a stair so that the real estate agent takes a tumble and breaks a leg (that only seems to require bandaging), making a demolition digger spin uncontrollably, lifting a jeep off the ground to stop it leaving the grounds with the children and heating up the real estate dude's crutch so that it violently burns his hand and reduces him to a Kermit the Frog voiced wreck. The spirits appear as two flames, a blue shred of spectral vapour, glowing pebbles, a toy fly and in the original human image of the mother and father. The coherence of the whole thing is hindered massively by the dreadful dubbing into English of the children's voices. They babble unintelligibly throughout and matters aren't helped by their constant sobbing and idiotic laughter. The film's other dialogue is generally awkward and unconvincing, characterised by that unnatural tone common of many dubbed films. Despite this, I feel that the narrative would remain disjointed and illogical even if delivered in its original language. Without a window into the children's joint psyche we are unable to contextualise their part in the events inside the house. Are they just weird kids, playing up because they've been orphaned or is there supposed to be an undertone of supernatural insight to their cruel and eerie behaviour? It's unclear. One is left with a desire for the aunt and uncle to leave the little oddities in the house with their spirit parents and get away from the nonsense ensuing there. Ultimately the parents' have had their revenge on their killer from beyond the grave and would surely be content to keep the house intact and the kids there. F** 'em, let them get on with it with their weirdo kids. To sum up: it plods aimlessly, with no natural conclusion in sight. The effects are hit and miss. The acting is decent enough on the part of the adults but the kids are utterly useless and the sobbing, dubbed voices steal at least half of the plot's sense. Avoid!

A couple is killed in an extremely sadistic way, but their souls return to their two orphaned children to caress them, to take revenge on the killer and to mock the relatives who want to sell the house and the one who wants to buy it respectively. Sounds odd for a Fulci movie, doesn't it?And it really is kind of odd. It starts like a typical Fulci-gorefest with the murder scene which has to be seen to be believed, especially when one considers this one was made for TV. But after this unbelievably violent prologue, the whole thing turns into a fairy tale. There are even scenes that could come right out of a typical Italian slapstick comedy! So, "La Dolce Casa degli Orrori" is an extremely strange mix of genres, and most of the special effects are very cheesy, although the murder scene is outrageously disgusting.It's not bad, but by far inferior to Fulci's other film in the four part TV-series Houses of Doom, "La Casa nel Tempo", which is terrific (the other two are by Umberto Lenzi and called "La Casa delle Anime Erranti" and "La Casa dei Sortilegi").