The House By The Cemetery
Director: Lucio Fulci
Cast: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni
Review by Brian M. Sammons

This lesser known (and admittedly, lesser loved) Lucio Fulci flick was released on this side of “The Pond” late last year by Blue Underground and it. Was. Good! Now it’s the Brits’ turn at bat. How does the always capable Arrow Video bring this very strange slice of Italian shock cinema our on Blu-ray? Well let’s find out.

The story behind this movie is deceptively easy to explain, but such a synopsis does very little to describe just how bizarre it is. But hey, got to start somewhere, so here we get a small family moving into a big house in New England with a sordid, bloody history. The young son, Bob, played by cherubic blond haired, blue eyed Giovanni Frezza, has a friend in a little girl only he can see named Mae who keeps warning him to stay away from the house. Not only does this bring up shades of Stephen King’s The Shining, but it’s also my biggest gripe about this movie: that damn kid. No, not the little Italian boy, Giovanni, who’s neither better nor worse than any other child actor, but the screeching, fingernails-on-chalkboard-bad voice they dubbed in for him for the English version of the film. Oh my dear God is it annoying! It’s obviously an adult doing a horrible “little kid” impersonation but the end result is every time little Bob opens his mouth I want to hit him in the face with a brick.

The second thing about this film that keeps it from being really great is the pacing. Once the family moves into the titular house the events proceed at a leisurely, strolling pace at best. The mystery behind the house’s horror (not to mention why a crazed maniac is living in the basement, popping out occasionally to behead, slice up, and rip the throats out of people) is slowly doled out a drip and drab at a time … that is until the end when there a big exposition dump. There are random bits of weirdness sprinkled throughout the film, like an unintentionally hilarious bat attack, and a few gruesome murder scenes, but sadly these seem like a far cry from the glorious gory gags in previous Fulci flicks. There’s a nice knife through the back of a woman’s head that comes out of her mouth bit, but that’s one of the few memorable kills to be found here. There is a neat rotting thing in the basement, a few genuinely creepy moments, but the film’s plot is a bit muddled and illogical, to say the least. How much so? Well when the film was first released on VHS many years ago some of the reels were played out of order and no one seemed to notice! Combine that with a lackluster ending that makes little, if any, sense and you get a movie that is long on mood and atmosphere, but short on logic. If you’re one of those people who need their films to make absolute sense, you might hate this movie. However if you can just go with it and enjoy the ride, you might dig this uneven, yet still mostly competent shocker.

Now this new Blu-ray release from Arrow Video looks pretty good in HD. No it’s not great, but it is very watchable and if you’ve only ever seen this on DVD (or lord forbid: VHS) then you’ll notice a world of improvement here. However where Arrow Video always shines is the shear amount of extras they do for their releases and once again they do not disappoint here. There are two audio commentaries to listen to, for interviews with the actors and makers of this movie, and a very cool 24 minute documentary called “Ladies of Italian Horror” that interviews a bunch of the European scream queens from all sorts of Italian fright flicks, not just those in House By The Cemetery. That special feature is easily the highlight here and is the cherry on the awesome cake that is this new Blu-ray.

The House By The Cemetery is both a bit longer and slower than it should be, and it has that damn screeching voice actor dubbing little Giovanni Frezza in it that drives me up a wall, but it’s still a good, creepy film at its rotting heart. If you’re new to Fulci films then perhaps Cemetery isn’t the best place to start. For that I would suggest Zombie, The Beyond, and/or City Of The Living Dead. But if you want to see something different, weird, creepy, and fun, or if you’re already familiar with some of Fulci’s other flicks, then The House By The Cemetery is for you. And like most of Arrow Video’s releases, this one is region free. I cannot tell you how happy that always makes me.

The Sinner
K. Trap Jones
Blood Bound Books, February 24, 2012
Paperback, $11.99
Review by Darkeva

The Sinner by K. Trap Jones is a novel broken up into seven parts, each to represent featurettes of the main character’s encounter with the seven deadly sins, an interesting narrative device. Things get off to a start with the preface, which explains “a lone farmer, chosen by God to test the boundaries of sin,” writes of his encounters with the demons who are manifested seven deadly sins. He suffers from visions that he catalogues, and he follows that up with his “translated” entries.

As for the prose, it has poetic qualities, written in verse that doesn’t rhyme, which I found distracting. Nevertheless, the story comes across well. The main character is a farmer who doesn’t know why God chose him, because he’s not religious. Admittedly, this is a nitpick, and fiction has a certain degree of poetic license, but what I questioned was, despite not knowing what era this is set in (it seemed pseudo-medieval), a farmer of the time would be illiterate. As well, the character’s voice sounded more like a philosophical monk than a farmer, but as the novel went on, some of the reasons behind this became more apparent.

Wrath tells of how the farmer’s village came under attack, and how he stood up to his attackers, who were on horses and wore armour. After he’s kicked out of jail to make more room, street life is worse than prison life, and he can’t leave the city because there are guards at the gates. The story chronicles his encounter with a wolf, who saves him from a harsh beating, and she turns out to be a pretty woman, Amon, who teaches him to be angry and kill as many noblemen as he can. His arrogance grows so high that he thinks of himself as a God, until he goes after a particular rich guy only to get a taste of his own medicine. I had a bit of a hard time sympathizing with the main character’s views that his killings were justified, even if his victims did treat him rottenly.

In the next section, Greed, the main character is a carpenter who becomes aware that a Plague is coming into town. He meets a cloaked figure, Mammon, who gives him the Plague and says his task is to spread the Plague. Mammon has the cure, and the main character can choose to dose only himself, allowing the rest of the townfolk to die, or he can give the cure to the town elders to make more cure, but in that scenario, it’s not clear how long he’d last, being infected. Eventually, the protagonist has no choice but to drink the vial to preserve himself, thereby damning others, only for the Plague to break into the town, which the villagers have made into a fortress that nothing can get out of. From there, the main character spirals even further into his descent until Mammon returns to say that had he given the vial to the elders, they would make it long-lasting, whereas the cure he dosed himself with was temporary.

In Sloth, he’s at a farm, closer to his element. He starts out with a great work ethic until an irrigation specialist, Belphegor, stops by and claims to have solutions to the main character’s problems, including more timber that his competitors don’t know about. Belphegor starts to make the farmer’s job much easier, until he takes over pretty much everything, and the farmer has nothing to do. He becomes lazy and doesn’t feel like doing anything, and is content to let Belphegor do all the work. But the farmer gets confrontational when he realizes Belphegor has the reins, they have a fight, Belphegor tells him there’s some cleaning to do in the shed, and a monster attacks the farmer, and he loses a hand.

The farmer has a choice-he can get his hand back along with his original work ethic, but he won’t be able to rest or have free time ever. Or he could keep his injury, and keep his restful, slothful lifestyle and still reap the benefits of the farm without having to work. He picks the latter, selfish option, of course, only to suffer the consequences.

Next, Gluttony showcases a butcher, who teams up with Beelzebub, his next door neighbour and a meat vendor, who convinces him to hoard the food supply he gets for both of them. When the weather gets a lot worse, he denies food to people, who starve while the butcher gains weight, gorging himself. When it comes time for his just desserts, the customers he denied have a particularly inventive punishment.

We then move into Lust, in which the main character is a peasant tailor in love with a princess. An old woman, Asmodeus, comes to him and promises that she can get him into the palace to declare his love, but when he gets in, he finds the princess’s husband, and suffice it to say, things don’t go well after that. He starts to feel betrayed, and takes it out on the girl, only to get screwed over, yet again, this time by Asmodeus.