"La casa fantasma" (1988) d/ Umberto Lenzi

Humphrey Humbert's at it again, this time using the same Massachusetts funeral home location that Lucio Fulci utilized seven years earlier with his own Quella villa accanto al cimitero aka/ House by the Cemetery (1981). Just to clarify, by Humphrey Humbert, we mean Hank Milestone / Humphrey Longan / Humphrey Milestone / Harry Kirkpatrick / Bob Collins himself. Umberto Lenzi has got more aliases than the Manson women, eh? When he wasn't condemning innocent animals to violent, on camera, snuff-death in his wildly controversial cannibal movies, Lenzi often took on projects like tonight's review, a mess as unlikely as it is incoherent. Let's have a look...


"I'll remove your vocal chords for food, " offers Dr. Butcher (Donald O'Brien).
While young Henrietta (Kristen Fougerousse) is on dark, creepy cellar-timeout for scissoring the family feline, her father takes a mystery scalp axing and mother gets knife necked upstairs, and Henrietta's disturbing, nursery rhyme whispering Jester doll may or may not have had a hand in it. Fast forward twenty years, where Martha's (Lara Wendell) data programming, ham radio enthusiast boyfriend, Paul (Greg Scott), receives a spooky transmission complete with nursery rhymes, cries for help, and screams. Naturally, this translates into the couple driving out to the source of the broadcast (with Martha getting five beans ganked by a black ghost-ophile hitchhiker along the way, I might add), where another ham radio user (I don't remember this being a terribly popular phenomenon in the late eighties, maybe I'm just ignorant?) has pitched camp at the brightly lit spook-house with his brother, sister, and brother's girlfriend in tow, against the warnings of grizzled psycho caretaker, Valkos (Donald O'Brien). Valkos doesn't 'warn', so much as physically attack the unwanted guests with a butcher cleaver, but who's keeping score at this point?


Throat lozenges and Visine probably won't rectify this situation.
Sure enough, Paul's kooky tape recording happen to be the voices of fellow citizen's band champion, Jim, and his young sister, who kinda looks like teenaged Jim Carrey in drag while under duress when the family camper springs to life, knocking her ass over tit. Wouldn't you know it,  Henrietta's ghost makes the scene, and that's when unplugged metal ceiling fan blades are mostly likely to cut a body's throat, along with your obligatory hammer kills, body bifurcations, pitchfork impalings, disappearing Dobermans, expanding, exploding glass shards all about the place, water taps pouring blood, echo chamber laughter, and even the Grim Reaper makes a cameo before the end credits. There's also the matter of that otherworldly Jester doll, and his nursery rhyme, inaudible to untrained ears, but to a professional drum such as mine, the song's whispered message is pretty clear: Watch something else...watch something else.


The Grim Reaper got a hunnert problems, but cuttin' a mothafucka ain't one of 'em.
Lenzi followed this one up with three efforts, House of Witchcraft (made-for-tv), Le porte dell'inferno aka/ Hell's Gate, and Paura nel buio aka/ Hitcher in the Dark, the following year. Wendel has appeared in genre fare such as Mio caro assassino (1972), Il profumo della signora in nero (1974), Un'ombra nell'ombra (1979), and even Tenebre (1982). Scott also showed up in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987). It should also be noted that no less than the late, great Aristide Massaccesi,  Joe D'Amato himself, was an uncredited producer on this one. Wrapping it up, shitty acting, a mundane script, and mostly over lit, under dressed frames not to mention Lenzi's production line attitude towards this sort of thing by this time,  force me to lay the single woppo upon it. He'd done worse, but also a lot better in and out of the genre, over the years.


"Get your mock scepter outta my frenulum of labia minora!"

"Sexplosion" (1990) d/ Denni Lugli

I first encountered tonight's review in a VHS bootleg catalog, of all places, back in the early nineties when my thirst for new cult/horror/exploitation was ravenous and increasingly difficult to slake, even with regular road trips in all directions to seek out and score new genre stimuli. Though I'm not gonna glorify the fly-by-night media brigands who offered the title, since we run a legit cabin cruiser of ill repute upon the seas of creativity here at the Wop, I will admit to ordering it through them back then, my curiosity precipitated by a brief typewritten sentence or two describing the ...ahem....plot of the eighteen minute long effort, directed by avant garde artist, Denni Lugli. Of course, when I finally got the tape, threw it in, and watched past the snow at the outset, I'd been given a copy of something else entirely, and not at all what I'd ordered months earlier. Oh yeah, did I mention that it took that long for my order to arrive, besides being wrong? That's what I get for fucking around with bootlegs, right? Fuck you. Then about fifteen years later...


Sembra legittimo e securo...provatelo!
After some brief grainy video titles and a Buttgereit-esque synth score, we meet a couple (Paul St. Pauli, Rrose Selavy) lounging out and watching television (...of the gonorrhea conspiracy variety, no less) while smoking cigarettes and drinking what looks like scotch. He momentarily ponders using a small vial of titular "Sexplosion" while she starts to get frisky... but no. They then decide to hook up the clunky, eighties-style Panasonic video camera and film themselves going horizontal. An affluence of titties, birthmarks, and hairy bush follows, married to a brief cunnilingus sequence and a longer fellatial bout, which leaves him sleeping unresponsive next to her, as she tries to awaken him for another more satisfying round of sesso, but to no avail.


"Il mio cazzo e' morbido come gelato!"
At this point, the unfulfilled minx sneaks off and fills a syringe with the aforementioned "Sexplosion", then fixes his sleeping ass up with it, before cuddling up to his naked form in anticipation of the hip-bucking hijinks to follow. Only, this stuff has suddenly transformed him into a slathering fuck fiend, complete with latex rubber facial appliances, bubblegum vending machine fake teeth, and a sizable phony cock that drips blood and semen alternately. He chases her into the bathroom, looking like a horny mountain variant Jerry Seinfeld while crucifying her tongue to the toilet lid with a pair of scissors, then taking her from behind with his new faux endowment, piped in grunts and screams abound. Then his dick falls off. Finally, we're treated to more video bars, tracking problems, titles, and synth.


"Ammirare l'artigianato di questo coperchio di toletta!"
The poor girl seen here appears under the pseudonym Rrose Selavy, which also happened to be the female alter ego of artist Marcel Duchamp, a sort of play on the French words for "Eros, that's life." How quaint. The guy appears as Paul St Pauli, not much of a nod to art, but twice as goofy sounding. According to Lugli's website which hasn't been updated in quite a while, he served as an assistant to Italian FX wizard Sergio Stivaletti on films like Demoni 2 (1986), Spettri (1986), and Opera (1987), though he's got no imdb credits on any of those movies. One look at his effects work here tells me he must've been more of an espresso gopher than a latex stirrer, if anything. Despite being little more than grainy Z-grade porn with some insultingly cheap and amateurish gore thrown in for whatever reason, it's just sleazy enough (and eighteen minutes is thankfully brief) to work as a rare trash oddity that you might pull a chuckle out of, under the optimum circumstances, with optimum in this instance meaning "well-drugged". The standard deuce.


"Posso chiamare di nuovo un po' di tempo?"

        This month of Italian genre movie reviews is posthumously dedicated to my favorite aunt, Julia from Manhattan, my head scarved horror movie buddy with a perma-hack that sounded like a glasspack muffler coming up our sidewalk, with Chou-Chou San Juliet Monteforte, her abusive male poodle, always in tow. As far back as I can remember, Judy was always down for cinematic scares with her weird little nephew, and we'd always rap about whatever late night gem we'd caught the night before while she downed cups of java and chain smoked Mores at our kitchen table. Things like Jean Brismee's La plus longue nuite du diable aka/ The Devil's Nightmare (1971) and Emilio Miraglia's La notte che Evelyn usci dalla tomba aka/ The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) scored big with her, and tv series like Dark Shadows, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and Night Gallery were always her favorites. She never shrank from the task of thumbing through the stack of horror mags and comic books I dragged around with me, from room to room, either.

         Over the years, my old man figured out that any horror flick that was too gruesome for his own tastes was right up his sister's alley, and he often sent her off to the movies with me, in his stead. She was there with me for Fulci's Zombi 2 aka/ Zombie (1980) at the American Theater, though I think she managed to see about twenty minutes of the movie in all, spending much of the running time smoking like a rubber burnout out in the lobby, back in the days when that sort of thing wasn't frowned upon at all. " Oooooooooh-hoo-hoo!! Crazy, man, cuh-razy!", she'd exclaim, as the foot long wood splinter entered Olga Karlatos' ocular orbit through the magic of Giannetto De Rossi and company. It was clear to anyone within earshot that she glaringly approved of such things. It was probably her encouragement that sent me off the deep end for those same things growing up, and why I still love seeing them forty years later. 

          So, it is to her gloriously eccentric memory, that the month of October be full of cult classics, exploitation oddities, and black gloved giallo goodness from the land of our heritage,  that seasons the blood pumping through my heart. Welcome to Italoween II...