"The House By The Cemetery"

[Fearless Freep]

The House By The Cemetery is what I watched today.

This is a rather confusing and inchorent movie by Lucio Fulci based looslely on a spooky old house in New England with something sinister in the basement and a stupid family from New York who won't take "get out of the house!" for an answer.  Many red herrings on the way to a gory end.  Interesting only if you like old-style gore effects...or you want to waste some time trying to figure out if all the reels are in the right order...

[The Burgomaster]

"This is a rather confusing and inchorent movie by Lucio Fulci"

So, in other words, it's the same as all of his other movies . . .

[plan9superfan]

Hell, show me a B-movie that is NOT confusing and incoherent...

[Menard]

This is a film which many of his fans consider to be one of his best.

I agree with you, it is incoherent as hell and ranks right along with his The Beyond for having a paint-by-numbers plot; you fill in the gaping plot holes yourself.

I loved Fulci's Zombie which had an unusually linear plot which made sense compared to a lot of his films. It seems as though avid Fulci fans are most pleased with onscreen gore and consider the plot to be secondary, if important at all.

[akiratubo]

Keep in mind there are at least two versions of this movie floating around.

One is incredibly incoherent because whomever distributed it recut it seemingly at random.

The other is the original cut and makes one hell of a lot more sense.  In fact, it's so straightforward I can't believe it's a Fulci film.

I got the original cut in one of those "10 movies for only $10.00" boxed sets.  It was widescreen, appeared fully restored, and was loads better than the recut VHS version I had previously seen.  It actually didn't dawn on me that they were the same movie until some time into it.  That's how different they are.

[Fearless Freep]

I guess what I meant by "incoherent", and for the recod I'm not familiar with Fulci's work, is that there was an awful lot that just didn't add up.  

*spoiler*

In the end, the movie was about the old doctor down in the basement who figured out how to cheat death.  And this is pretty much only explained in a quick bit of exposition dialog by the husband/father character about 30 seconds before the vampiric-zombie Dr. Fruedstein kills them all anyway in the final scene.  Nothing else in the rest of the movie really led up to that.  The bloody bat attack, the spooky girl in the painting who talks to the kid, the weird babysitter, (and the mannequin version of the same women who gets her head chopped off.   A lot of scenes that seem to be trying to set up that there is something very creepy about this, but none of which ties into the idea of 'killer in the basement'

*end spoilers*

As I am not much of a gore fan, this dissappointed me as the gore scenes don't really motivate me to look past the story and acting to think "oww...that was a cool death"


I got this one on a DVD with three other movies for about $5 so it was kinda hit or miss on what I got.

I also got in the same DVD

"I Bury The Living" (which I've mentioned here)
"Creature From The Haunted Sea" (1961) - A comedy dressed up as a gangster monster spy moviie from Roger Corman
"He Walked By Night" - starring Jack Webb...haven't seen it.

[ToyMan]

you can grab a somewhat decent version of this, from the "wonderful" people at diamond entertainment, for a low price. it appears that the film was either taken from a widescreen vhs, or the laserdisc. really, you shouldn't pay more than $6 for it, and you get what you pay for.

the film itself is somewhat interesting. it comes off feeling like a bridge between "the beyond" and "the new york ripper".

i felt like all of the spooky touches sort of came together. it's like lucio was saying "this zombie bastard in the basement is so bent, so mutated beyond recognition, that his energy and the generally dastardly nature of his intentions has warped space and reality around this house and these people"...

[plan9superfan]

Shouldn't a movie called "The House by the Cemetery" be about a haunted house?

[ToyMan]

define "haunted".

[plan9superfan]

Haunted... you know. The Amityville Horror, The Shining, House on Haunted Hill.

Possesed by evil spirits, ramoing with ghosts.

[Fearless Freep]

. it's like lucio was saying "this zombie bastard in the basement is so bent, so mutated beyond recognition, that his energy and the generally dastardly nature of his intentions has warped space and reality around this house and these people"

That's reaching...

[ToyMan]

...haven't seen many fulci films?

[Fearless Freep]

Umm..actually...no I haven't  this was my first

[Scott]

This was one of my very first DVD's. It didn't work for me, but maybe one day I'll check it out again. It wasn't terrible, but I didn't find it very good over all.

[ToyMan]

freep, i ask because lucio's films often grasp at pretty far straws. the obvious and cliched comment about his work is that he's like a slapdash dario argento. mimicing only the results, and not the equation.