The House By The Cemetery (1981)

This tell-all movie title still tickles me. When my Husband asked what I was watching I replied, "The House By The Cemetery. It's about.... a house by the cemetery." He did not join me in watching the rest of this surprisingly entertaining movie.

A House By The Cemetery is a rare and precious little gem lost in life's sidewalk free pile of horrible movies attempting to be cult classics. Although the quality is not great (the dubbed-over voices are nothing less than hilarious), the plot carries the viewers on a little twisted tale with strength and curiously spooky scenes.

One scene in particular involves a bat, a kitchen, and a hand. This scene begins with a start, continues on for an uncomfortable period of time until it becomes so absurd it's nightmarish.

Let me share with you what the DVD case had to say: "An eerie mansion holds some terrible secrets and ghoulish horrors for a family moving into the home. While the husband looks to complete a colleague's research, the wife and son are forced to deal with strange noises and mysterious locked rooms. Behind all these things is a bizarre figure with a lust for killing and a dark past".

I highly recommend this film for those of you who enjoy cult classics which are not really cult classics. In fact, make it a double feature night with one of Lucio Fulci's other movies, Don't Torture A Duckling.

Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)

Found myself in a discussion about why I'm watching a horror movie everyday, today. The more I spoke, the more complicated I realized the motives behind my strange endeavor were. 

Why am I doing this? 

Well, it could be because I find horror movies to be a sort of meta analysis tool to view hidden fears of a community without the community being made aware they are being viewed. For example, a horror story can, to a degree, provide an omnipresent view of a life/a situation/a collective fear without an observer effect. The observer effect; where the act of observation changes the object being observed. Horror stories in particular because fear, like garbage, shows society's underbelly - and I've always been a Budda belly rubbin', Pilsbery Dough Boy belly pokin, ahhh that hit the spot belly scratcher. And our family weekend trips often included a trip to the dump. Never Liked It. But, it was always interesting. 

Speaking of family - could my love for the horror story be due to some nurture effect? I thought it was pretty normal at the time, but turns out that having a father quietly leave the dinner table, only to return dressed in a horrific mask and chasing five screaming children from the dinning room, was not normal. Or perhaps, Mom should have given a second look at the movies we picked when she said: "...just anything that is 99 cents" during our weekly movie store visits. Suppose I shouldn't be surprised that me and my brothers grew up to eventually jump out of graveyards at unsuspecting passerby's, or threaten little kiddos that trolls would come out of the wall if they didn't clean up their room (I was asked not to come back and babysit).

Perhaps I'm subconsciously trying to prepare myself for catastrophic events; treating movies as if they're training programs? So when someone comes up to me and says, "My best friend was just eaten by a werewolf", I could say "That sucks, want some Cheetos? No? Fiiiiiiinnnneee. I'll go get my sliver bullets."

Or maybe, quite simply, I love them. I love ghost stories around the campfire (a small collective coming together out of the darkness for a shared purpose). I love historical correlations (fear of science or fear of a loss of religion, see also Frankenstein, H.P. Lovecraft, or any B-Rated Horror movie).  And I love Halloween (dressing up - especially dressing up to scare away bad intentions).

Which brings me to tonight's film: Don't Torture A Duckling. A dubbed over Italian film by Lucio Fulci. Apparently considered a classic, it looks like Chaos. 

Update:

Early 1970's Italy, skeletal monks, 11 year old children smoking, strange nude woman living in an attic, pop music soundtrack at inappropriate times, Donald Duck, a witch hunt, headless dolls, the sin of having a child with birth defects, priests with nothing to loose, and an epileptic voodoo believer who can't quite let it go... this is Don't Torture A Duckling. Yup. Chaos. Crazy, wild, religious what what what? chaos. 

Recommended pairing: Nothing. I consider fasting for this one. Watch with friends if you can.