The films of Lucio Fulci are generally known for two or three things: incomprehensible plots, remarkable cinematography and so much gore you feel like you need to get a mop. In fact he shares the title of "Godfather of Gore" with that other genre legend, Herschell Gordon Lewis. I've covered a couple of his films on this blog in the past - The New York Ripper and (sort of) Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 - and both of them were certainly memorable, albeit for different reasons. So I figured it was about time to cover a couple more of his films, starting with The House by the Cemetery.
Norman Boyle, his wife and his young son Bob move into the old Freudstein house after the previous professor who was living and researching there apparently kills his mistress and then himself (except that we see in a pre-credits sequence that they are apparently both killed by someone else in the house - although they could just be two random people who made the mistake of canoodling in the wrong house; it's almost impossible to tell). From the very start it's clear that things are more than a bit sinister; the house is built on a cemetery, there's a tomb in the middle of the hallway floor, the door to the basement has been boarded up, people keep telling Norman that they're sure that he's visited the town before even though he hasn't and Bob keeps seeing a mysterious young girl called Mae who tells him not to come to the house. Once the family is moved in, things start to really go downhill and the body count quickly racks up, and the mystery of just what - or who - is in the basement is eventually revealed...
The gore in the movie is as plentiful as the plot holes, which is exactly as to be expected from a Fulci movie. A bat is stabbed and blood squirts and flows from every part of its body. Norman keeps insisting that he's never been to the town before, but the furtive looks he shares with some people (such as Ann the mysterious babysitter) seems to suggest otherwise. People get decapitated, get their eyes gouged out, get kitchen knives right through their skulls and out of their open mouths... The people in the town obviously know that there's something going on at the old Freudstein place, but at the same time they're apparently more than happy to just keep feeding it people without ever warning them. Surely the town's tourist trade can't be that reliant on a house inhabited by the crazed mutant zombie of one of its former residents (oh yeah, spoiler alert: It's Dr. Freudstein in the basement)?
Of course, these holes don't damage the film. The gradual rise of tension as the film progresses, along with each death, holds the attention well, culminating in one particular scene where Norman attempts to break down the basement door with an axe to save Bob - unaware that Bob's head is being pressed against the door at the same time. It's a spectacularly framed, tense scene.
The film's ending has, for a long time, left audiences baffled, however, because it's ambiguous to say the very least. In an interview all the way back in 1982, Fulci did in fact reveal the meaning of the ending - rather than spoil it directly I'll instead link to it here (And yes, after reading it I found it all made a great deal more sense, although you might need to know a little more about the mythology of some of Fulci's other films to understand it fully).
The House by the Cemetery was another of the UK's infamous "video nasties" in the early 1980s, even though some of the film's nastier gore scenes were cut even before it made it to the cinema by Fulci himself (because he didn't like the way they turned out). Even when it was first unbanned in 1988 it lose over 4 minutes of footage to the censor's scissors, and it took until 2009 for the film to eventually be released fully uncut in the UK.
Finally, a word about Bob. I don't think there's ever been a single review of this movie that doesn't mention this, and so who am I to go against tradition? Now, the child actor playing Bob may have been a good one (aside from his haircut), but we never get to know for sure because they decided to dub his voice with an adult actor trying to do a child's voice. And it's terrible, to the point of nearly ruining the movie completely. Really, it's that bad, especially since they have long sections where they have the kid making nothing but racing car noises as he plays. It's almost enough to drive a person to mass murder and mutilation...
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