Come Back Pazuzu, All Is Forgiven

You have to hand it to the Italian movie industry: they certainly made a lax trademark regime work for them when it comes to producing knock-off sequels. From Jaws to The Terminator to Alien, Hollywood hit after Hollywood hit would find itself rehashed by unscrupulous Italian B-movie studios in the 1980s. I’ve previously outlined how Dawn of the Dead – known as Zombi for the Italian release – spawned an actually pretty good Lucio Fulci followup before the Zombi series got into diminishing returns, and how a totally absurd number of movies got released as Zombi sequels on the sly regardless of anyone’s original intentions.

A smaller-scale but no less bizarre franchise-which-isn’t-a-franchise is the La Casa series. La Casa, you see, was the Italian title for The Evil Dead, and naturally La Casa 2 was Evil Dead 2. This inspired Joe D’Amato to commission an unofficial La Casa 3; directed by the highly variable Umberto Lenzi at his absolute nadir of competence, this would be known in more trademark-respecting markets as Ghosthouse and is absolutely awful; Rifftrax did a pretty good job on it if you have to go there.

Astonishingly, Ghosthouse was actually kind of a hit, one suspects because viewers put down their money thinking they’d be getting more Evil Dead and it was astonishingly cheap to make. Two more Italian-made La Casa sequels were made before the second and third House movies got repackaged in Italy to round off the series. Well, strictly speaking only House III: The Horror Story got repackaged as La Casa 7; House II: The Second Story is referred to as La Casa 6 but was never officially released under that exact name, leaving the series with a gaping hole at the 6 notch.

It gets more bizarre: Ghosthouse became the foundation of another franchise-in-name-only, with Lamberto Bava’s The Ogre, two other Umberto Lenzi haunted house clunkers (The House of Witchcraft and The House of Lost Souls, themselves part of the La Case Maledette series of made-for-TV horror films), and La Casa 4 and La Casa 5 forming the other members of the Ghosthouse series. Even wilder, La Casa 4 is sometimes designated as Ghosthouse 2 and sometimes as Ghosthouse 5, at the sheer whim of the various video distributors who participated in this nonsense.

Once you start getting into this stuff it gets outright fractal – Bava’s The Ogre was also dubbed by some (incorrectly) as being the third entry in the Demons series. So let’s back up from the edge of the abyss and just concentrate on La Casa: 88 Films have, for some goddamn reason, put out blu-rays of La Casa 4 and La Casa 5, so why don’t we take a look at them. After all, how bad can they be?

Dear reader: they can be astonishingly bad.

La Casa 4, AKA Witchcraft, AKA Witchery, AKA Ghosthouse 2, AKA Ghosthouse 5

Calling itself Witchcraft on the print 88 Films used, this was directed by Fabrizio Laurenti and is notable largely for landing David Hasselhoff to play the male lead, having been made right in the middle of his career slump between Knight Rider ending and Baywatch kicking off. The Hoff plays Gary, a photographer who accompanies his buddy Leslie (Leslie Cumming) on a paranormal research expedition to an isolated island off the New England coast.

The island is home to an abandoned hotel complex which is the focus of much local legend, the root of these superstitions being linked to the witch persecutions that happened in the area centuries ago. The place’s dire reputation means that the hotel is up for sale cheap, and the Brooks family – domineering mother Rose (Annie Ross), father Freddie (Bob Champagne), pregnant daughter Jane (Linda Blair) and young son Tommy (Michael Manchester) – are stopping by for a viewing, since they are considering buying the place and reopening it. Accompanying them is the estate agent, Jerry Giordano (Rick Farnsworth), who’s eager to make the sale, and Linda Sullivan (Catherine Hickland), a sexually voracious architect who’s coming along to do an estimate of how much it would cost to renovate the place.

This makes things rather awkward once the two parties encounter each other, since Leslie didn’t get permission to go to the island and it’s private property – but that’s soon the least of anyone’s worries. The boat that took the Brooks to the island has vanished, and a storm’s up so the rubber dinghy that Gary and Leslie used to get here can’t be used either. And it is evident to the viewer – but not yet the characters – that everyone has been drawn to this place by the mysterious Lady In Black (Hildegard Knef), who it’s implied might be a former Hollywood star who, after filming a feature on the island, became obsessed with the place to the point of buying it up and making her home here, abandoning her career entirely.

Or rather, the spirit of that actress – for the Lady In Black is manifesting in ways which make it clear she’s no mundane human. And that’s just the start of the strangeness that will claim the lives of most of the visitors to the island, as the forces of witchcraft gather and the gates of Hell yawn open…

“They’re Rehashing It… and Then They’re Going To Rehash Me… OH MY GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWD!”

The Italian zombie movie boom was catalysed by Dario Argento becoming involved in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; in return for assistance with developing the story and securing funding, Romero agreed to let Argento produce the non-Anglophone edit of the film and do distribution to the non-English film markets. Under the name Zombi it was a monster hit, and when enterprising producers engaged Lucio Fulci to produce an unauthorised Zombi 2 – dubbed Zombie Flesh Eaters for those markets where pretending to be a legitimate Dawn of the Dead sequel wouldn’t fly – the movie he ended up producing was massively profitable.

A rash of further Italian zombie gut-munchers would follow, with no small number of them presenting themselves as Zombi 3. Eventually, producer Franco Gaudenzi of Flora Film would tap Fulci to make an actual Zombi 3 (or, for markets where that wouldn’t fly, Zombie Flesh Eaters 2). Fulci would not finish the shoot, amid conflicting stories as to whether he walked off set due to personal illness or creative disputes, and eventually Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 would become part of the disreputable portfolio of Bruno Mattei.

The end result was a commercial flop. Gaudenzi seems to have then indulged in an astonishing bit of sunk cost fallacy, decided that what he needed to do was to engage someone to knock out another zombie movie on a skeleton budget – yes, a skeleton budget compared to Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 – presumably so that he could dump it onto the market as a cash-grab.

This wasn’t the worst lapse of judgement on Gaudenzi’s part, though: that was entrusting the direction of the movie to Claudio Fragasso. As well as being a regular enabler of Bruno Mattei, having written the script for Mattei’s Zombie Creeping Flesh, Rats, and Zombie Flesh Eaters 2, Fragasso was also a bit of a director himself, having been an uncredited co-director on all three of his movies. When it comes to his accomplishments as the main director on a project, one of his movies is actually rather famous: it’s this obscure cult movie which you might have heard of called Troll 2.

The Clumsy World of Bruno Mattei

Back in the 1970s, Italian horror cinema tended to have a good reputation – the greats like Dario Argento were producing some of the most aesthetically interesting entries in the genre, the “giallo” trend paved the way for the modern slasher movie but always seemed to be a touch more thoughtful than Friday the 13th and its imitators, and even the B-grade material had at least some interesting ideas underpinning it.

Then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, things changes. Whilst you still had good, thoughtful directors producing good, thoughtful films, the industry shifted and a greater emphasis on producing cheap rip-offs of more popular films took hold. A few islands of arthouse horror remained, but they were increasingly threatened by the rising tide of exploitation trash.

One of the most infamous producers of terrible B-movie trash in this scene was Bruno Mattei. Often working closely with his regular scriptwriter Claudio Fragasso – who’d go on to direct Troll 2 – Mattei would leave a trail of cinematic wreckage behind him. Astonishingly, some of these managed to attain controversy – in particular, Hell of the Living Dead actually made the Department of Public Prosecutions’ video nasty list, though a failed prosecution led to it being removed from the most serious category. This can only be due to confusion between Hell of the Living Dead and one of the various zombie films it rips off – for it’s more of a “video clumsy”, a piece offensive not because of inappropriate content so much as incompetent delivery.

Hell of the Living Dead (AKA Zombie Creeping Flesh, AKA Virus)

At a mysterious chemical plant an experiment that is not really explained to the audience in any way is in progress. (At one point it’s referred to as “Operation Sweet Death”, which is hardly encouraging.) Some of the scientists are conducting checks in hazmat suits with large, flappy hoods which aren’t actually tucked in or secured in any way – as a result of which the suits are not in any way airtight, watertight, or capable of resisting… say… an out-of-control zombie rat that jumps into one of their suits and starts attacking one of them, or for that matter a massive leak of toxic gas when the scientist who’s been attacked falls over in a bloody mess.

“They’re Rereleasing It… and Then They’re Going To Rerelease Me… OH MY GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWD!”

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The story is well-known, Troll 2 having been skewered on bad movie websites since the early days of the Internet. The Watts family – father Michael (George Hardy), mother Diana (Margo Prey), older teen daughter Holly (Connie McFarland) and preteen son Joshua (Michael Stephenson) – have had a rough time of it, what with Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby) having died six months ago and Joshua regularly seeing vivid visions of Seth delivering bizarre warnings about goblins.

These warnings come thicker and faster as the Watts family embark on a holiday trip to Nilbog, a tiny rural town that happens to be the home of a gang of goblins with a remarkable knack for disguising themselves as human beings but absolutely no subtlety when it comes to coming up with town names. (Joshua only figures out the Nilbog/Goblin thing after seeing the town’s name reflected in a mirror, because ultimately he’s just not that clever a kid.) The goblins are strict vegetarians, but also love murder and anthropophagy, so they have a fun little compromise: before they kill people, they feed them an evil potion concealed in ordinary food which transmutes unsuspecting humans into vegetable matter.

There’s a wildcard factor provided by Holly’s loser boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) and his loser friends Arnold (Darren Ewing), Drew (Jason Steadman), and Brent (David McConnell) coming along in their RV in the vague hopes of getting laid – but they’re made short work of by the goblins and their leader, the gothy druid Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed). Will the Watts family be able to summon Grandpa Seth back from the dead in a necromantic seance to help out in the final conflict? Will Seth and Joshua be able to destroy the “Stonehenge Stone” which gives Gielgud her powers? And what power lies within Joshua’s special double-decker bologna sandwich?