Hey Leo, hi Steven, I have figured out the perfect way to continue selling our podcast. Oh, good, good. See, you need the other podcast to listen in to really be a part of the whole experience. So we need people like, give me back my action horror films and good beer, bad movie night, you know, cinema slab and dissect that film. We'll kind of, if we need all of them to help us get listeners, right? So we've gone from tolerate to need now. Yes, exactly. Which is a major step in our relationship with them. It's a big moment. They should be very proud. We'll be putting a ring on it soon. Are we all official if we all cover the ring series at the same time? It's, it's a wonderful podcasting marriage. In order to do that, in order to get other people to listen to your show, you have to quote them. That's the whole thing. You got to be like, oh, dissect that film, said that brilliant thing or bucket of chumps at this brilliant thing. And then it gets them to listen and then they tell people, oh my God, about supposedly horror, they're so great. So I have an idea. I've come up with a random quote generator. All right. Okay. Basically, we just get to some part in our lame ass movie that we're covering. And then we're like random podcast name, random quote, random movie, pop up, inserted into the episode. It's great. Sort of like product placement when they back in the day. Yeah. Exactly. So let me, let me give you an example. So we're talking about a movie and then we get to the point where we're going to do a quote and then it's like Steve from bucket of chum podcasts said this movie warms my social justice heart. Lassie, it's like that. It's like, and it just randomly happened. So we just inserted into the episode. Sounds like something he might say. And then we just go on from there with AI being so prominent these days and the deep fake world being what it is. How could we be sure that is something they would say? Or more importantly, do we care? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Barely listening anyway. It's like everyone else. Exactly. This movie is trash said Charlie from give me back my action movies about cabin in the woods, right? Like that's random. Yeah. Totally random, but sounds believable. Stephen and Leo are hung said Pete from good beer. We know he says that. That's the kind of thing he would say. Yeah. Bring on critters five said slumus lab. Welcome everybody to spoils a horror. My name is Stephen. I am Leo. And this is episode number one hundred and forty seven ghost house from 1988. But an excellent day for an exercise. Look at me, Damien. It's all for you. I'm our number one fan. I hope they are watching there, see, there, see and they don't know. Pretty minds. That was a scary. I'm scared to close my eyes. I was scared to open up whatever you did. Don't fall asleep. I have to admit your choice this week made me feel nostalgic, Stephen, for the good old days of spoils of horror, where we used to deliberately choose a film just to completely torture the other man. And I've gotten a lot of really that vibe out of this. I'm not sure if that's what you're going for. But begs the question, then, why are we watching ghost house? What a great, great point. There was a magic alchemy in the beginning of this show where you and I made a very conscious choice to not pick really popular movies right off the bat because we wanted to get our the ground underneath us. We wanted to figure out what we were doing. But it ended up being sort of this weird, magical thing that you and I have always spoken highly of that we've always said was a really good choice on our part because we covered a lot of fun stuff. And we really kind of almost gained a notoriety for being a bit of an obscure podcast that would cover some obscure stuff. And we decided to keep that. We actually really enjoyed that. But that is actually not totally where this came from. So I watched this movie at random on Tubi. This was a year ago. You've been sitting on this for a year. I've been sitting on this movie for a year and originally I had hoped to cover it with a cut above guesting on our show. We actually had the episode planned with them. And unfortunately we actually had to cancel. So I would really like to get a cut above on the show at some point. That's very important to me, whether they are on individually or whether they are on together. Nate is barred from our show. So that's not so he won't be back anymore. Charlie, you can come back whatever you want. I guess this one's dedicated to them then. It is dedicated to them. But there'll be more fun stuff that we can torture them with down the line. I'm very much looking forward to that. You're so right. This really does feel like a little bit of a throwback to the first couple of months of spoils of horror. So are you ready to get into it? I'm ready to get into it. And I'm willing to say a cut above you dodge double it. Good job. The movie begins by showing a spooky old house from every single angle possible. An old man looking for a cat follows an irritating song down into the basement. A little girl in a white dress is holding scissors with blood on them. After getting locked in the basement, she pulls a clown doll out from behind some furniture. Moments later, the old man is killed with an axe. His wife is stabbed in the throat after being lacerated by an exploding mirror. In Boston, Massachusetts, an amateur radio operator named Paul tells his girlfriend Martha that he recorded strange sounds over the airwaves. There was a lullaby followed by a cry for help and a howling scream. They decided to trace the signal and find the source. After picking and dropping off an annoying hitchhiker, they follow the signal outside of the city to a house seen at the beginning of the movie. It has all the trimmings of a haunted house, including cobwebs, old newspapers and creepy groundskeepers watching from the trees. In the Attic is a radio with a guy named Jim. He's camping in an RV outside with his sister Tina, brother Mark and girlfriend, Susan. I feel like there's not a lot of horror movies that are cast in Boston or, you know, mostly if it's a New England horror film, it's Salem or it's somewhere off in the woods in Maine or whatever, you know, immediately that it's Boston. Not because you can see the historic sites like the old State House, but because there's a moment where a jaywalker runs out as if he owns the road is nearly killed, rather than stop the car that Mayan just drives forward, shouts asshole. And you know that that all tracks. This is definitely Boston. Yes, absolutely. Although there is a very prominent shot of Fanuel Hall, which is a big historic building in Boston, one of our main care sort of crosses in front of it. Like she's shopping for baguettes because that's what you knew there. That's what it's for. You do there, but sure, this intro is so interesting because in a different movie, this wouldn't be necessarily a terrible intro. You have the haunted house vibes. You have these two main characters that get killed and you have the ghost of this little girl. First of all, I did find these opening shops absolutely hilarious because it just shows you every single piece of exterior of this house. Like it shows you everything. This is like a penthouse photo shoot for a house. You see things that no one any, but they don't let you see. Close your shutters. You naughty. Ooh, I could see it between the two stairs. Is that a bookhead with all that topiary full bush. Somebody trims their hedges. You're chimney. So dirty, right. I do like these style of films that when they are cast in New England, especially are able to find the most amazing architecture to film their places in. This house looks amazing and you only see this sort of thing out on the East Coast, I feel. Oh, and it's filmed in Cohesit. So it's not filmed all that far away from Boston. And that is one thing that just fascinates me about this film is you've got this New England haunted house vibes, which we'll get into later. But then on top of it, you have Italian horror and Italian horror, especially Italian ripoff horror is fucking crazy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You want to make poltergeist great. It's going to be more like the ring or it's going to be more like Godzilla, but it'll say poltergeist vibes to it or more like burial ground. I mean, like, I mean, there's this movie. I mean, did you not think of burial ground the entire time? Oh, yeah, I mean, you've got the Italian dubbing. You've got some characters that are speaking in English. But then you've got some characters that are clearly dubbed. Yes. And to true Italian horror fashion, very, very well-tubbed wink. Yes, exactly. Their mouth is moving a mile a minute and they're talking in strange dialogue that we'll get to more later. But at the same time, like there are things about the style that I enjoy, like it's a little batshit crazy. You know, first and foremost, you have these kills that happen in the front. They're kind of great kills. You know, there's an axe that comes into the back of the dad's head. It had that same pottery effect, like in burial ground. Like, remember how the heads of the zombies were very, um, coarse? And they were like pots. And I actually loved that about that movie. I thought that was super cool. It has the same effect and it shows literally an accent to go that goes into the back of a skull. It looked great. It's very gory. But at the same time, it also has to do like what Italian horror does, which it can't just be a ghost that comes and kills people. It has to be a mysterious disembodied hand that will never find out what this actual hand is. The sequence is the dad goes downstairs, finds the little girl with a creepy clown doll. She apparently killed the family cat. His punishment for her is to lock her into the basement in the dark, all on her own, rather than get her professional help. But, you know, whatever, pray the problem away, I suppose. Sure. Suddenly this weird, ghastly hand shows up and kills these two parents. The clown doll didn't do it. The little girl didn't do it. I don't know what other fucking ghost in the house did it. Somebody just showed up and murdered these two and we never hear why or who it was or any of it. And it also happens after a pretty fantastic sequence where a mirror starts to like bulge out and then the glass explodes and then lacerates this woman because again, in Italian horror, you can't just kill people. Like you have to like maximize their terror. Yeah. And you're like exploding glass technique they did on this. It was really good. Oh, it was really cool. And that's what I kind of enjoy about this movie in a weird way. Like, I guess I can reveal right now. I do think that this movie has the status of great bad horror film because it's swinging for the fences in a weird way. And you could be like, okay, cool. Like, this is a cool haunted house flick, but this movie is just throwing everything at you right from the start where this glass lacerates this woman for no reason. It's not trying to prevent her from leaving. It just does it. And then a mysterious killer comes out, stabs her in the neck and this mysterious killer other than maybe one part later on is never shown again. Yeah, it's fucking crazy. But to your point, this is how a horror movie should start. We always want that big kill right up front to get you hooked. And they did a very good job for it for what the movie was. For what this movie is exactly. It does a pretty good job. So then we cut to Boston, Massachusetts, where we meet Paul. And Paul was described on Wikipedia as an amateur radio operator because you see him operating a radio. That's pretty much it. He doesn't have any job around this radio. You just see him operating radio. Therefore, he is an amateur radio operator, which would be kind of like cutting to a shot of me making a smoothie and saying I'm an amateur blender operator. Anyone who remembers his time in American history, when ham radio was all the thing, that's what he was doing. And it was early internet, I guess, is the best way to put it. Is somebody just reaching out to other people on the radio? Hey, look, I can call Australia. Isn't that weird? And look, this looks to me like the early version of a person who has no job, who is just sitting playing video games for 24 hours a day. That's it. That's what it is. These kinds of nerds have existed for years. It just has a different medium along the way. It does make you feel better to know that in cells have always existed. This guy didn't sport the fedora, but he's definitely in there because he loves that stupid old computer setup, which I'm sure was high tech for the day, much more than he loves basically anyone else in this movie, including his girlfriend. OK, OK, what a great transition to what I want to say because I want to talk about his girlfriend and the computer. Literally that it dialogue in this movie is so awkward. And it does come off as maybe somebody who doesn't speak English and then translated it over into English because it's just a weird phrasing and weird moments. And there's one right up in the front here that I really love. So Paul gets a call from his girlfriend, Martha. Martha is going to be kind of our main character throughout the movie, both of them are the main characters. But Paul calls her and he's like, oh, you know, where are you at? What's going on? She says, I'm at the library. I was supposed to be home earlier, but, you know, I'm going to be home in two hours. And he responds with this line. He says, you better not get in any trouble. You don't want to lose your scholarship. And she says, I know it's bad taking tourists around Amsterdam. I'm not stupid. What the fuck does this mean? I mean, first of all, there's not a library in that area just to get a little pedantic about the whole thing. Sure. Secondly, you're not an Amsterdam. What the fuck? What are you talking about? Like, what kind of trouble could you possibly get into the library that you're going to lose your scholarship? Are you turning tricks outside? Maybe that's a she's over a fan. You all for her. She's a real combat zone. Oh, right, right, right. Oh, that's what it all. Think about that. I didn't think it was on purpose that they showed you that she's a fan. You all for those of you who are not Boston. They're in the Boston Public Library pretty far away from each other. So that's what it was. She was you were supposed to know you were supposed to be like, Oh, somebody's outside of fan. You'll haul wink, wink, show it her ankles. Yep. Classy. Oh, I'll be home in two hours. Wink, wink, what? Yeah, by the way, let's talk about that. She says this flirting, I guess, on the phone where he's like, I've made some chili. She says, keep the chili hot. I'll be there in about two hours. Keeping the chili hot for two hours. That's not what the fuck. Well, she also says, keep yourself hot. She says, keep yourself hot. What is the strange way of saying that? What is he supposed to do? Edge himself for two hours over the chili with. I don't know what's going on. It's a really weird kink fetish thing. And I'm not shaming you guys. I'm just saying, I don't get it. You want to have your boyfriend kink over a hot bowl and chili kink kink edge is what I meant. He's going to be standing there when she gets home in just an apron, fully nude underneath, staring the chili as sexily as possible. With, you know what? This is so bizarre. And this movie is just all filled with this weird off-kilter dialogue where you can kind of tell that they're flirting, but it doesn't, but the words don't sound like flirting. I mean, I'm with you. What am I supposed to do for two hours to keep myself hot? I don't think there's only so much porn. It's amazing. I can keep myself going for two minutes when we're actually having sex. And then my favorite part. They cut immediately to this young couple in bed. They're not fucking one of them's fully dressed. The other one's getting dressed. So I don't even know what happened. They're just in bed. A sudden cut jump. It's the next day or later that night. I don't know whatever. It seems like time has passed and we're going to assume it's the next day. And she says, I'm going to go get some chili and he's like, get me some too. I'm like, what is this tomorrow? Chili? Is this leftovers? What how much fucking chili do you make? That's how good the sex was after he stroked himself for two hours, waiting for her to get back from turning tricks at the library. This is the story that's in my head. This is a weird couple. And then they immediately go into something that he heard over the radio. So like, this is their after second. This is their pillow talk, baby. I'll pat myself on the back for that reference. They immediately start talking about a signal he got over the radio. And it's the signal where he heard this irritating music that we'll get to late later. Yeah, no we won't. And then he heard somebody crying for help. He heard somebody saying, help me, help me. Oh my God, help me. And then screaming. So they immediately go into like, Hey, what was this radio thing? Like, what's wrong? And then they very quickly come to this conclusion. We could have gotten a murder over the signals and we better investigate. Yeah, suddenly they become Scooby-Doo. Right. They got to track down the literally worst acting I've ever heard in my life from this fucking radio. What the fuck is going on? I was going to save it for later quick. We've got to help this person. They need acting instructions. Oh my God, the calling for help, which we're going to meet this character who was calling for help later. But it's really it's just it's bad. It's something to behold these two all of a sudden in like the history of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown and Angela Lansbury. Decide that only they can solve the mystery. Let's not call 911 and go to the cops and say, here's this tape. Somebody's in trouble. No, let's just drive out into the fucking wilderness. But then they have this wonderful dialogue sequence about how they're going to follow the signal and she's like, Oh, can you trace the signal? He's like, yeah, I can I can feed the information to my fucking Mac 95. You know, this giant brick of a computer that he has. He's like, in order to follow the signal, I need to feed the information through the computer and compare it to the sound wave variables. And I'm like, I got you, bro. I got you. I watch Star Trek. I know techno babble too. You got to feed it into the space anomaly because there could be a warp core breach. I get it. I get it. That's right. Yeah, a little chewing gum and a triple. We're all set. Exactly. Yep. This is just fucking Apple to could not do anywhere near the amount of shit he's saying it can do. It's just not awesome. Whatever you're going to do. Make it so whatever you're going to do. Yeah, they get their ghost, hunty kit together. They get their scooby van. They drive out. This is where one of the worst parts of the film comes to play when they pick up a hitchhiker. I've gone on before about useless characters in a movie. The useless character in a movie syndrome is even worse when it's the most annoying character in the world. Yeah. Oi howdy. Did this movie nail it? Man, oh man. So this actor who plays this character is is African American. And boy, proof that in back in the eighties, we did not have great roles for black actors because this is like if you took Shelly from Friday 13th part three and stuck him in hell. Yeah, this is you. This would be like being stuck in a room with that character for five hours. This is annoying prankster who can't shut the fuck up. Prankster in quotes, by the way, this pranks are not very good. This is him amusing himself. It's mostly him using a skeleton arm to grab women is mostly what it is. He's a tool. He's an absolute tool and he briefly shows up this movie because the only thing he exists is to be a kill later on. That's it. So he's going to briefly show up in this hitchhiking scene where they're going to dump him by the side of the road. Thank fucking God. Because I actually find some of this movie to be so bad that it's charming. But thank God they ditched this person because man. Oh man, this movie would be infinitely more fun if he weren't in it. I got to say they could have just had him show up later. Like he just stumbled upon the house walking down the trail or something. They didn't need this pre scene with him in it to introduce him later just to kill him off immediately. His kill isn't even that good. It's not even visible. I was going to save this for later, but they don't even show the fucking kill this movie. Say what you will about it. It has some pretty fun kills, but man, oh man, this character is irritating. But don't worry, everybody. He's in five minutes of the movie and then he shows up later at the end and he gets killed. Yeah, they picked him up off the side of the road. They dropped them off literally 10 blocks later. He was that great of a character. Can we get something out of the way right now? I feel like we got to address this in the beginning because it's all throughout the fucking movie. Every time something evil or terrible is happening. This lullaby comes on. And I only say the word lullaby because everybody in the movie refers to it as a lullaby. It is a sound, a music, but we've got to put this in here at some point. We've got to put maybe at the end of the movie or now, whatever. I will definitely make sure this listen, you people who are only going to hear our show and never watch this movie, you're not getting away from this. If I had to suffer through this, so do you. This music's playing. This music is going to be continuously playing throughout this fucking episode. Every time it comes over the radio or it'll come over a TV or it'll come, you know, like from another room in the house and some character will follow it to their doom. This just happens over and over and over again. And again, when I was reading the Wikipedia article about this movie, it described the sound as eerie. Now, I don't know if the Italian word for eerie is irritating, but they got it correct if it is this fucking brainworm of a sound is so fucking irritating. It made me want to rip my own eyes out. If this is a movie that is supposed to be like season the which where it's supposed to make me want to kill myself, it did its job. Fantastic work. Yes. It's like watching a found footage movie when the people are talking, you can busy yourself with other shit because it's not important. The moment everything goes quiet, you know, that's when the scary shit's going to happen since when you look up at the screen. Right. It's like that. You basically don't have to watch this movie, but when you hear this sound go off, pay attention, somebody's about to die. It's like one of those old Disney, remember that Disney haunted house book, you know, like the Mickey Mouse and the ghosts? And it would say like, when you hear the boot or the page, that's, that's sort of what this is like. It sounds like chamber music being played while a drunk gremlin is singing. Like, you know, it reminded me of, I don't know if anyone's going to get this reference, there's an old text Avery cartoon about a cat that learns how to throw his voice and he just goes, meow, meow, like that's throughout the entire cartoon. That's what it sounded like. It sounds like that and it plays with the consistency of by the pale, pale light, the pale, pale light of the moon from, from the hauling to just how that song just keeps coming back over and over and over again. I mean, I swear to God, we hear this sound 40 times in the movie. Easily, easily that if I had had to watch this film one more time, I would have hurled myself out the window. We remixed style. And while this moment of auditory delight is infiltrating us, we meet old weird Harold, who shows up at the house to scare these kids. And every other moronic piece of cannon fodder for this. Yes. Oh, God, they should in these horror movies, they should just back in a truck with people with toe tags already on their feet. These characters don't just get dumped in front of this movie. Then you're like, okay, these are our bodies. These are our people that are going to get killed in this haunted house movie. I see what you did there. So yeah, we meet like all these we meet. It's a for some reason, it's older, like, I don't know, like late teenagers, maybe early 20s, but it's a brother, his brother. It's like a guy, his brother and his sister and their girlfriend. What a random assortment of people. Yeah, everybody showed up for a camping trip to this old abandoned house because breaking and entering is the best way to go camping. They've got the RV outside. There's what? Eight of them, six of them in the RV and one a motorcycle. Four of them. I actually watch this movie three times. I didn't always have a concept of how many characters there were. One of them, oh my God, happens to be a ham radio enthusiast also. Yes, got his set up up in the attic where James or Derek, or whatever fuck his name is, goes and finds the radio signal he's looking for. The new guy jumps in and is like, what are you doing to my shit? I wanted to say for those of you who did not grow up in the 80s, it was a friendly or time. It was just a friendlier time. You could be two people like Paul and Martha. You could go to an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. You could go up into an old strange haunted attic, find a ham radio, meet a total stranger and he could respond to finding you in an attic with his stuff by telling you his entire life story. That is exactly what happened. He says, who are you? We're here on a camping trip. We brought a ham radio. That's my brother and my sister outside, a lot with girlfriend too. Anyway, sometimes I suffer from IBS. So why are you here? He just sells them everything like right off the bat. I mean, you're not wrong. The 80s was either you're going to make a friend or you're going to die today. There's no middle ground. I just laughed every single time this guy was like, who are you? Let me tell you who we are. Would you like to see my driver's license? Like I just tell them like just fucking dumps on them. Just gives them this monologue about who. Let me tell you all the characters that just showed up in the film. Let me tell you who we all are. Anyway, did I mention my sister Tina? I was probably lying and Susan, she's a bitch sometimes. Anyway, my brother, Marcus, dumb. Like you want to play with my radio? Like it's a Lego set or something. And then they do the thing that like it's supposed to make it sound like great dialogue because at the end he goes, anyway, what are you doing here? Yeah, yeah, very high school production. Very well done. Oh, God. And so we find out then that this new guy is the voice of the screaming guy that. Was heard on the radio earlier that started this investigation, right, which is so clear from the moment he started speaking and he has one of the greatest most idiotic lines in the movie. He says, well, clearly that's my voice. And obviously that's the sound of my sister screaming. But what does that mean? And like he admits that it's his voice, but then immediately says it couldn't be him and it's the classic OJ Simpson defense is really what it is. Right. My radio was turned off last night. Leo, you and I both have siblings. I have no idea what they fucking sound like screaming. I actually the other day, my brother asked me to pick him up some snacks and he wanted chips and I stood there and realized I didn't know what flavor chip he liked. I've been with him my whole life. I don't know what kind of flavor chips he likes. I certainly don't know what the fuck it sounds like when he's screaming. I've never heard that before ever. I've known my brothers since I'm the oldest. Like they I've known them since they were born. I don't know what they sound like screaming on a reporter. And I don't want to know. Exactly of all the things we should know about each other. That's at the bottom of the list. Martha follows the irritating music down to the basement. Jars of canned fruit begin to explode, flames shoot from the furnace and a severed head is spinning in the washer. When everyone follows her screams, everything is back to normal. The images were in her head. Martha Paul and the other more expendable characters stand outside trying to understand what happened. They decide to drive into the woods and use Paul's radio to see if he can pick up another signal. Jim Tina. Don't worry, guys. You don't need to know who these people are. And a few of the others stay behind and experience more strange phenomenon. The little girl in her clown doll appear on a TV. Something begins to violently shake the RV and Jim goes into the basement to find Henrietta's ghosts surrounded in light, frozen in fear. He begs for help before a fan blade shoots from the room across the room. Just keep the mistake. It's fine. It's because I'm laughing killing him with a slice across the neck. Things get weirder. Tina comes downstairs and finds Jim's body only to be traumatized by Henry. It is ghost Henry, this little girl, everyone, whatever it does matter. Chased by Velkos, who's the groundskeeper? Who his name I didn't read until the credits is carrying a meat cleaver. She runs hides and escapes the lunatics with the help of Mark Paul and Martha. And I'm just going to tell you, Leo, keep all the mistakes in there. Cause these characters names are not said at points that make any sense. So keep it off. I'm going through that much editing for that shit. You're crazy. It's damn. And for those that need a little hint on what we're alluding to earlier, this movie so far has been 30% attempt at horror and 70% ham radio. Yes, literally nothing but ham radio happening at this point in the film. We finally get all the players together. And the reason I labeled this as a Scooby-Doo production is because now we get this weird fucking groundskeeper who's trying to kill everyone for some fucking reason. I don't know why it doesn't make any sense. And it's not really something that goes anywhere in the film. It's it's not even a red herring, which I think is what they were trying for. It just kind of dies on the vine. I think he was supposed to be the uncle of the little girl because there's this exposition, exposition dump later in the film that we'll talk about when a police officer arrives in that exposition dump. He says, old man, Willie, who lives out in the woods, probably thought you were his brother went crazy, but I never understood any of this. No, no, it doesn't make sense. It is very Scooby-Doo. It is very much like the red herring of the film. Like they're going to pull this guy's mask off at the end. Right, they're going to pull the ghost mask off and it's going to actually be somebody else, but everybody thought it was this poor soul of a janitor or groundskeeper that was just misunderstood. Yeah, unfortunately that tracks for what this is. But the basement scene is kind of fun, just because again, it gets to what I enjoy about Italian horror ripoffs. Because look, I mean, this is some great Italian horror. You and I fucking love demons. The ripoffs are different. The ripoffs are special. We joked before about Tommy knife hands as a ripoff character. Yes. Freddy Krueger, the juice demon costume you find at Spencer's or whatever, because they can't license the character out. These things exist and they're terrible. The same thing happens in film. The Italian horror genre is incredible. People ripping off the Italian horror genre. Yeah. It's the worst shit in the fucking world. Sometimes incredible, bad enough to be good, but other times just fucking rotten. Well, again, burial ground is a ripoff to some degree of night of the living dead. I mean, even though for all of its craziness, it has some creativity that does make it a little different and maybe a little bit more worthwhile for sure in the sort of gutter cinema that it is. But this is different. This is just like a blatant ripoff and there's look, we're going to get into them later. I want to cover some of these, but they're like Italian horror slasher ripoff. So of Halloween and what a total that are crazy. It is kind of fun when it gets into this moment here because it goes a little bonkers. You know, we, you've got these great glass exploding effects, which actually look kind of cool, even though they just simply don't make any sense. It doesn't really track why the ghost is trying to scare anybody in this film without actually killing them because there's really no point to scaring people. It's not like other horror films where like, it's not like a Nightmare on the street where when their fear is heightened, Freddy Kruger is more powerful. Right. You know, it just simply acts as a horror trope to scare the audience. Then the kills can just happen later in the movie. It just doesn't really do anything, but it doesn't mean it's not fun. You know, so the glasses explode, fire shoots from the furtice. There's a severed head going around in a washing machine. What is the perfect setting for a washing machine with a severed head inside? Gentle cycle, that's exactly what I'm going to say, a gentle 30 minute cycle. You just want to get all the, yeah, you want to get it washed off and you don't want to ruin the leather. Exactly. Exactly. You might be making a face later. And this is one character from the kids in the RV. I think her name is Tina. It's the young sister of everyone else. Everyone keeps coming down on this chick. Because they keep calling her a liar. She lies about everything and blah, blah, blah. And she's a little annoying, not nearly the most annoying character in the film. And maybe she's making things up for attention. Maybe it's an abuse response because everyone in this movie keeps calling her a fucking idiot to her face. There are four characters in this RV, which I don't blame you Leo for not knowing how many characters there were because I didn't know either until I literally counted out their names and figured it out for the script. There are four characters in this RV, three of which have no personality and no character traits whatsoever other than one of them is a terrible actor. The fourth character is Tina, who the only character trait that they give her is apparently she was a compulsive liar at one point in her life, like at 15 or something, and they just dog on her throughout the entire film. And they keep saying you're a moron. You're an idiot. Get the fuck out of here. And she's got probably the worst self esteem in the movie of anyone. Yeah, and I don't know if this is true, a trope that I've seen in the limited amount of Italian horror that I've seen. I feel like a trope in those movies is that often a character who is psychically intuitive is in Italian horror, it doesn't. It actually usually means they're going to die as opposed to in an American film where it usually means they're going to live, right? So usually so if you have a slasher, you know, like Laurie Strode is like aware that something's happening in Hadnfield in the first Halloween movie, she's aware. Leslie Vernon has jokes about the awareness of the final girl. But in an Italian horror film, a woman walk in the house and she'll be like, I feel like there's a presence in here. I feel like there's something here. And that usually means that she's going to have literally a horrific death where she gouges out her own eyes due to the things that are in her mind. And in this movie, it means that she's going to walk in the house, say, I feel like there's something in here and everyone's going to look at her and say, you're a fucking dumb bitch. Tina storms off into the camper. She's pouting and brooding. She gets some sort of signal on the television that has this ghost girl and her little creepy count clown doll on it. The only thing we can say is if the camper is rocking, don't come knocking, I guess. Rimshot here. Yeah, that the whole camper scene is weird because the entire thing starts shaking as if they're in a California earthquake, but nothing happens. Right. He dies, no spooky shit. Nothing flies across the room and cuts her. It's just a weird moment. And then she runs out of the camper, runs into the house and it's over. Right. So when you have kind of a gonzo haunted house movie, the idea is that the ghosts just attack, you know, they just attack in a weird way. Like buddy, buddy, buddy, buddy, I can never say it. Bloody muscle bodybuilder in hell is a good example of, you know, the characters go in the house is haunted and the things just attack. They just start possessing and attacking. And so in this movie, we get those like scares, but in the Amityville horror or even the shining, the ghosts don't have physical power. Right. And so they have to use, they have to use fear in order to turn the characters in both of those films, the dads into axe wielding maniacs. And then later on, in both of those films, the, you know, the ghosts start manifesting actual physical power. Right. In this movie, the ghost, and wait till we get to the end of the film. Wait till we get to the last five seconds. This ghost can do anything it wants to. But of course, it doesn't make any sense because why would you scare characters that could just run away when you can just kill them? And again, you could say that the point is to get rid of the people. Okay, fine, fair. But then why are we toying with them? Why not just scare them so much that they can go or why or, or then you wouldn't even want to kill them anyway? Cause if you kill them in their bodies and then just police are going to show out people are looking for them, just scare them, get rid of them and call it a day. I've talked about this so many times in other movies we've covered. Like what is the point of the buildup? What is the functionality of fucking with these people for days, weeks or even months on end and not actually dispatching them? If you want to scare them out of the house rather than kill them, hurl a meat cleaver into the wall right next to their face. You've got the physical power to move shit around. Make it so that it's dangerous for them to stay there and they will go. Otherwise you saying boo or screaming get out or shaking the walls that don't mean shit and it's just wasting time. It gets to one of the things I don't like about a lot of bad haunted house films is bad haunted house films give no motivation to the ghost. The ghost has to have some motivation or the house or whatever has to have some motivation as to why they're doing what they're doing. You could do a ghost film where even the ghost isn't necessarily malicious. You can just have the scares be that the ghost is trying to make themselves aware to the other people. Maybe they want revenge or something. Maybe they do. You know that old story where they're like trying to get the person to go under the basement to find them, to find the clue as to who murdered them. You know, which that's a good ghost story. I enjoy that. You know, and so then in that kind of story, the ghost has a motivation. The ghost has limited powers, can only appear so much and is trying to go through the, you know, the veil of the living and the dead to be able to speak to the characters and say, Hey, this person killed me. Can you go and call the police? But bad ghost movies just trying to be scary. Right. And just throw anything at the kitchen at the wall to see what will stick and just make it scary. So when the ghosts show up, Oh, well, that's what ghosts do. They just go and they do scary things, giving them motivation to the actual character itself. I think it's illustrated well in the next scene, actually, when Danny Dipshit goes into the basement to find out what's going on. It's one of my favorite scenes of the movie. We see this creepy little girl and her clown doll down there in Wisconsin, a glowing white and that shitty music lullaby thing starts playing again. And now we realize the words we heard on the recording earlier are coming from this guy because he starts doing the same lines. And I have to now retract my earlier statement when I said the recording was the worst acting I'd ever heard in my life. I was wrong. This moment where he tried to do the scene for a second time was the worst acting I'd ever seen in my life live and unplugged. Oh, man. Oh, man. How? That he's somebody helped me. Hello, for God's sake. And all he's doing is looking at the little girl. There's nothing happening. Nothing's scary yet. There's nothing threatening. Nothing is happening and he's losing his fucking mind. I don't know if he's worried about mold in the basement or or if he just doesn't like that the fan is running and wasting electricity. I'm not sure what is stressing about so much because you're right. Nothing bad has happened. Nothing is bad has happened. Even though watching that fanspin is the most telegraphed death I've ever seen in my entire life. I have seen movies where they introduce a wood chipper or some sort of a thrasher or big machine early on. And you're like, yep, somebody's going to die in that later. This is still the most telegraphed fucking thing I have ever come across. I thought to myself, if that fan does not come loose and cut off his head, I want a refund. Well, fortunately, sir, they get to keep your money. I just have one complaint, though. This had a chance because his acting is so bad and is such a desperate audition tape for being in some sort of like haunted house play at your local high school that when the screw comes loose on that fan and kills him like final destination style, if that entire fan blade had popped off and cut his head clean off, this would have been officially the funniest death we've ever covered on this show. That still goes to fatal games. I wish to God, each of those fan blades have come off one by one. Yeah, cut his throat, cut an arm off, cut a leg off. You know what I mean? Bit by bit chopped them up up against the wall. It would have been the greatest fucking kill in cinema history. For me, I wanted his head to just go clean off like it was cutting through butter, like it was like old school butter body, because I just wanted his head to just pop into the air. And then I wanted him to I wanted to see his head going up into the air. And I wanted him still to be able to say the same monotone voice, help me, help me. Please, dear God, as his severed head falls on the ground. I would have then dethroned fatal games as having the funniest death we've ever covered on the show so close and yet so far. I know you tried so hard, those towns. You could have been the best, you could have taken it all the way. There you go. This also doesn't make make a lot of sense to me because he was completely at the opposite end of the house from the ham radio, nowhere near the fucking thing. How did this get recorded? How did this get out on the air? How did him screaming in the basement and getting his throat cut? Which, by the way, was not followed up immediately by his sister screaming. Leo, you are asking me to explain to you how a movie with ghosts and characters saying long lines of dialogue while they're clearly their mouth is saying less words. How the things that they said in the current time were recorded in the past through an old ham radio. I don't know what to tell. Doc Brown. Eat your heart out. Well, it gets to the nature of something I've already brought up. This is what I call a Kenshed Sink haunted house movie. Like it just throws everything but the kitchen sink at it. It has got like time loops. It's got mad caretakers. It's got ghosts. It's got illusions. It's got everything, including an attack dog, which is going to be in our next scene right afterwards. Yeah. Sunday August, sudden. This, this attack dog also may be laughed really hard because of the limited special effects of this movie. If you want to know the tone of ghost house, everyone don't think of poltergeist. Think of the don't trailer from Grindhouse. That's perfect. Yes. So the don't trailer, the brilliance of that joke is that it is an old school haunted house movie. But the joke, because the trailer is fake, is that it is indiscernible. What the movie is about. Right. Yes. Exactly. It's so funny. It's such a wonderfully funny joke. But the dog scene is like particularly funny to me because one of the characters hears the screams in the basement. So he runs to go, you know, try to help this person and like a doverman or whatever is blocking the way in order to show that the dog is a ghost and illusion. The character, I mean, this is not what the character is trying to do. It's what the movie is trying to do, but a character to defend himself takes a candlestick and throws it at the dog and it goes through the dog because it is supposed to show you that the dog is a ghost. But what I love is the special effects are so bad and they can't make the dog an illusion because the dog actually has to be standing there. That what they do is they throw the candlestick and the candlestick just floats through the dog less, less like the dog is a ghost and more like the dog just absorbed the candlestick into its body. Yep. Somebody hit the wrong button on the fade out control panel and right. I didn't have the candlestick fade away. They had the fuck or the dog fade away. Anyway, yes, everything you're describing. It's fucking stupid. It's so bad and I am a defender of the special effects in this movie because I think they're great. The practical ones are a fucking moment where they couldn't. Oh, what are we supposed to disappear? The dog or the candlestick, the dog or the cancer? Sir, I hit the wrong button. I mean, the candlestick disappear. Please don't send me back to Pizza Hut. I only make 550 an hour there. As long as I get my boob, I'll take my bag and I'll go home. But I'm sorry about the candlestick. It made me laugh so much. I just wanted to die. The dogs like mouth to start moving afterwards and be like, you're measly candlesticks only increase my power. What are we going to do with a ghost candlestick? The dog was supposed to be the ghost. You guys. In a world that has been completely divided for so long, two movie fans have decided to unite for the people and the betterment of mankind, one, an action movie buff, the other, a horror movie fanatic. Together, they will try to bridge the gap of both genres into one podcast with their battle cry, give me back my action and horror movies. Listen along as Charlie and Nate alternate each week talking about action and horror movies they cherish mostly from the VHS era. Also, including some modern examples that felt like the movies they grew up with by answering the battle cry, give me back my action and horror movies. Available wherever you listen to podcasts, look them up on Facebook and Instagram. Later that night, Martha follows the sound of a barking dog to a dust covered children's bedroom on the second floor. She opens a trunk and finds a picture of Henrietta next to the clown doll. Its teeth become sharp. The irritating song starts to play and everything in the room begins to float. The clown seems to attack from behind, but it's another illusion. Police officers remove Jeff's body from the basement and our main characters learn the history of the house. It's the site of a double murder. Two parents that we saw in the beginning of the movie were butchered there a few years earlier. Their little girl was found locked in the basement dead and the house has been shut down ever since. While several characters stay behind to pack up the RV, Martha and Paul drive back to Boston. They are somehow able to use Paul's gateway PC to figure out that the radio signal is a code which leads them to a nearby funeral home or something. It doesn't matter. They go on an odyssey and find that the previous owner of the house was a grave robber who stole the clown doll from a corpse for his daughter Henrietta. During the investigation, Velco murders the manager of a funeral home. So Velco's or crazy Ralph or whatever the fuck he is. Also, like never a name that I would have thought would have been associated with this character. They never named him in the movie. They never said his name in the movie as I didn't even know he had a fucking name until you said you saw it in the credits. So there we go. When I saw Velco's written on Wikipedia or on the, you know, somewhere I thought to myself at what point did a man like a person in a man bikini with like an axe show up in this movie. That's what he does. He goes on his little killing spree. He ends up in the basement trying to pick off one of the characters as they're crying over another dead character or some shit like that. And I would like to point out this illustrates the point I had made in a previous episode. A pitchfork is an incredibly clumsy fucking weapon to use. Just ask Jason Voorhees. He got rid of that shit after part two. See how fucking see what I fucking clots he was in part two tripping over shit and falling off chairs and all that other shit and he's a pitchfork. It's a stupid idea. Do you imagine? Do you imagine that in Friday, 30, part two after Jenny got away, he threw that pitchfork down. He's like, these are stupid. I don't want to fucking pitchfork anymore. He kicks it five feet away from him. This is stupid pitchfork. I'm going to use. I'm going to use a machete in the next movie. It's going to be 3d and it's going to be great. If you would have been dead if I had a chainsaw fucking. Right. Pitchforks. So there's this whole sequence where the crazy one-eyed Willie, the caretaker, runs after these characters just starts attacking them for no reason with a cleaver, especially after this other guy has been killed by a mystical fan that has shot out and slid his neck. The ghost has the power to fucking kill someone with a fan blade. Why do we have this crazy caretaker shit? Because it would work in a different haunted house film. Because if the if the ghost's powers were just a lucery, then it would need a muscle. And so it would have it would have taken over this person or it would have, you know, influenced them to become the muscle. So I get what they're going for in a better movie where the ghost can't just control shit on its own, which that's what makes no sense. And so we have now we have Martha, who is kind of like consoling these characters after this guy's just run after the meat cleaver. Now he's hiding the woods. And let's just spend a minute on Martha, our main character, who is officially, you said that Tina was not the most annoying character in the movie, you are totally correct. That is our lead Martha. Yep. It is. She she plays the role of an Italian horror lead like Italian female horror lead pitch perfect, which is that she is a little flirty. She's a little curious. And when she has any inter intersection with horror, it sends her into an unholy spiral of screaming and mania. Which I think is one of the reasons why it seems so off putting in this film is because everybody else is so very American. Yes, her style of horror people. It doesn't it doesn't blend well just because of the other people around her. Right. Exactly. I think that's so true. She's married to the plot. So she is literally like following our main character throughout the entire film, but she never does anything. She never has any agency. She never actually has any impact on the plot. She's more like Paul's emotional support animal. Oh, that's very well proven. There's a scene. I don't even know where in this film, it doesn't matter where they get back to Boston. He's like, Hey, I'm following up on this whole thing with the murder and all that. It's super weird. And she loses her mind, calls him an idiot says we're through and storms off. Right. And then two scenes later, they're back together against Scooby doing their way back to the mansion. These characters have this fight in the center of the movie that has no actual like role in the rest of the film. It doesn't raise the stakes. It doesn't do anything. Usually a fight about two thirds through a film is meant to raise the stakes. It's meant to, you know, ask yourself like, Oh, well, these characters get together. You know, what's going to happen to their love story, not that we give a fuck, but, you know, right? That's that's the purpose of it in most films. And this it just kind of goes nowhere, especially because they're, they're argument is so heated for no reason. Literally, it was big. Yes, it was a very big argument. Basically, they've gone back to Boston. He has said like, Oh, I think I've figured out what this this submission is. And she's like, what you figured that out while I was washing my hair. Yeah, because I was reading this book, you idiot. And that's the, I don't say idiot, but they, that is the tone of this argument that they have over nothing. Yeah. And she gets super like zero to 100 like immediately. And then the the relationships over we're done. Right. Until it's back. It is fucking ham radio and waits for two scenes later where they're all good again. Earlier in the movie when Tina has like lost her ship because you know, her that her brother got his throat sliced open and bad things are happening. She needs to be calmed down. And so she's put in the RV and she's put to sleep. And Martha looks at everybody and says, don't worry, I gave her a tranquilizer. Because apparently, she just happens to have them laying around. Well, some people like crack cocaine. Some people like tranquilizers. That's how it goes. She really was turning tricks outside of Fan you all in Boston. I just got to stand outside of the library for two hours and self tranquilizers. Or she's tricking the guy into the back alley and then putting him to sleep and stealing his shit. One or the other. Hey, you know what, that that would be a more interesting movie than the one that we're watching right now. As this whole weird fight sequence with crazy Ralph, then I think it's what is it? What is it? Martha? Oh, I forgot her name already. I was that fucking invested. She goes into another room in the house. I can't recall why what brought her there. Maybe she heard the music. Maybe she was just bored and need to look around. And this is the scene where everybody wants to compare this movie to poltergeist. Because everything like there's a no Easter suddenly appears in this room. Everything is blown around. And this weird little doll ends up landing on her back trying to choke her out. So what is so funny about this scene is that it's supposed to be like the big ghost moment. Think of the part where the mother in the exorcist walks in and sees everything floating. That's what this is supposed to be. But what happens is Martha walks in the room. She digs through a toy chest for no reason whatsoever, pulls out this spooky doll is clown doll. It's kind of like the clown doll from poltergeist. You know, by the way, I almost keep saying poultry guys, which is by the way, probably more accurate to what this film actually feels like. And yet is still an insult to poltergeist at the same time. She picks up this doll. And then this room goes crazy. Feathers start going everywhere. Stuff floats around and whatnot. But what's so funny is that there is a huge inconsistency between the way she is screaming and reacting versus the way everything is floating in the room. Because they don't have the special effects budget to make everything float and move around aggressively. It's all floating in a very relaxed way. So it's feathers that go up in the air. And it's little cushioned teddy bears going back and forth. And then she's going, this just to give you an idea of like how light this feels, it looks like a transition in the movie Labyrinth. It looks like a part where like feathers go up in the air and all of a sudden our main character, she's like in a fantasy world. You know, like, you know, at the end of the film, when they toss the ball up in the air and it turns into a fucking bird and then it brings it back to the room. That's what this transition feels like. It feels very fantastical. But she is screaming bloody murder at the center of it. And I don't understand why she couldn't just leave the room. What was the issue here? The door was open. She could have just walked the fuck out. Jesus Christ, like, I don't know if she has like a feather allergy or something. I'm allergic to down myself, but I don't react like this. Right. Yeah, she doesn't like down even softer. I don't know what it is. That would have been great if she just like dropped to the floor and then just crawled her way out underneath all this shit spinning in the air. So you know, when you go to an amusement park and they'll have those big glass boxes that somebody will go inside of and the air will blow up dollar bills and they have to catch them. Imagine if somebody got in one of those, they closed the door, they blew up the air and then the person started screaming and panicking and banging on the glass. Right. Halfway through the movie now. And he would think this would be a good idea because everyone keeps screaming for this kind of shit. Somebody had the great idea to call the cops. Yes, it was incredibly blase as they're hauling bodies out of the building. Then the cop decides this is the time to dump exposition on everybody. The entire back story of everything in this movie gets explained right now, which a is ridiculous for the plot of your movie. B is not something a cop's gonna do. Just start railing on these kids randomly about an open investigation and all of the information they're in. It's so funny because it is just this random like hour of backstory about this house. This cop just drops on these kids and all I can think to myself, does he do this at every single crime scene? Like what he's like at like a what he's at a crosswalk arresting a litter bug is he like, Well, you may not know this, but back in 1952, there was a triple homicide here. And somebody's head was found inside their asshole. And it was crazy. Before that, there had been another sighting of a Bigfoot that walked through the same area. I think this dude's lonely. Like somebody's alone because he just needs to talk these people's ear off. This has all the hallmarks of one of those old people at the cash register at the grocery store. Yeah, whether they've got all the coupons and they've got change to pay with. And you know, they don't need to do that. But they're doing it because the guy behind the register is talking to them. And it's the first conversation they've had in a month. It is just so funny to watch this like backstory after backstory back in 1962. That's when they built the stairs on this unit. And then somebody was shot in the face on those stairs. And I think it's their ghost that made Henrietta's ghost with the doll killed the two people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to see these characters eyes glaze over like I just wanted them to see I just wanted them to be them staring at their watches. I feel like that actually happened because very shortly after this, they all just packed up and fucked off. Right, they just left. Okay, we're out movies over. Right, exactly. This is the point of the film where everybody starts leaving this house and then coming back to this house and then leaving this house and then coming back to this house. And then two people can't leave this house. But then the other two people can leave the house so they leave the house. And then one person can't because they have to go get a motorcycle, get a part that will get the RV working that will help them leave the house. I have never seen I've seen a lot of haunted houses movies where people can't leave. And I've seen a few where they just say fuck off and they leave immediately and then you find out the ghost is following them. You know, right, right. I don't think I've ever seen one where the people keep just forgetting shit. Oh, right. Oh, my keys, I got to go back. All right, we got your keys. We barely made it out of life. Let's go. Oh, that library book I owe. It's still in there. Fuck. Let's go back. Right. And there are no stakes because nobody's trapped in this house. Right. But everybody acts like they are. So our main characters have to go back to Boston to figure out what's happening in this house, what's happening with this ghost. But as far as they know, all the other 20 year olds have left. So I don't know if they're worried about the property value of the house or if they're worried about local pets or one-eyed Willie who's out in the woods. I have no idea what they're worried about. What are the stakes of them trying to solve this ghost problem when there's no one at the house? Well, and they're not really even trying to solve it. They're just going, Hey, that's fucking weird. Well, Tina's a liar. But hell, let's just get out of here. They're not doing anything to solve anything. They're just acknowledging that it happened and moving on. Right. And this is the thing is that this movie takes something simple and makes it so complicated. I mean, talk about the way that the rest of the plot is going to be unveiled, which is that so the cop basically tells the kids that there was a double murder that happened, you know, in the house many years ago, and then the little girl was found in the basement. And so that's what we find out from him. He's explained it in a very long-winded way, but that's what he explains to them. So then our two main characters go in this odyssey where they use the computer and something the computer figured out that never made any sense that leads them to a funeral home where they get some information that leaves them to a graveyard. And this is all just so convoluted for them to get this piece of information. The dad that owned the house was a little bit of a grave robber working at a funeral home. And he stole a doll from a dead body, the clown doll and gave it to his daughter. And that is what this haunting curses. That's it. That's all you have to do. Yeah, just streamline that have them go straight to the graveyard, have them talk straight to that groundskeeper, you can still kill the groundskeeper, you can do all that. You don't need the groundskeeper, two different groundskeepers, you know, the one from the well, you know, house. Yeah, there's a million people that just is town is full of groundskeepers. It's all this all this is where they all go and learn their craft number one industry and coass in Massachusetts. But it's equally stupid because the cop basically explained all of this already. We didn't need the scene where they went to the coroner's office and figured it out again. Right. One or the other. I do love the funeral because yes, because there's two different scenes. I didn't even include the stuff with the corner. Because I know. Yes. Why? There's a whole dialogue sequence between one of the police officers in the corners where the corner believes that there was ghosts that were actually doesn't have it matters. But then the funeral home seems is the same way for me. Our main character goes to a funeral home where the father of the house used to work the one that got killed in the beginning. We do find out things that we need to know that this dog that this, you know, doll was stolen and that caused all the problems. But you don't need them to go to that a second location. This is my point. Yep. You know, to kind of have the same story play out. But the funeral home director did do one of my favorite horror movie tropes. I've said it on this cast before. I know I love it. I love it. I love it. When somebody is asked for a piece of information and they recall the exact piece of information that the characters need to move along the plot. So our main character, Paul looks this funeral director and says, Hey, did this guy ever steal anything that matters? And the funeral doctor goes, I don't know. This is 20 years ago. I don't think I'm gonna remember anything. Oh, wait a minute. I remember he did steal a clown doll. I wish you guys could I wish you could say Leo's face right now. He's his eyes are rolling into the back of his skull. I got to be honest with you guys. I was actually going to save this for the recap. I fell asleep every single time I watch this movie. I had to literally go back through and watch the end of it in segments just because I needed to get through it. I have not been able to stay away from this movie. And right now I feel like somebody drugged me as we're talking about it. I'm having trouble. Keep my eyes open. That are fun. That are stupid fun. But this scene where they're figuring out the mystery is not one of them. Not at all. I'm literally dosing here. It's not about your narrative or anything. It's just this is so fucking dull. And this has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. And I'm just done. I wanted Paul to look at this funeral director and say, Hey, which objects did he steal? I need to figure out this mystery. And then for their title card to be like five hours later. Yeah. And then the funeral director's like, and then there was a hairpin that he stole on one day. And oh, I remember about the time that he took that person's pinky ring. And he thought it was a toe ring. So he put it on his toe. That was hilarious. And none of this pays off. That's the worst of it. There's nothing here. There's nothing to this. And all of this bullshit just drowns the movie. Oh, and there's a funny sequence where the funeral director gets killed because I got to kill this character off for no reason. And so the care I keep using the word caretaker because there's several different caretakers with the one that is the red herring killer. He does commit some kills, but he's not the villain of the movie. He shows up the funeral director, and he makes some random justification as to why he needs to kill him hits him with a hammer. And then has this hilarious sequence where he picks up the body. And he puts him in a coffin. And the implication that he's buried alive. But nothing ever happens with the body. He just closes the lid and the body, you know, the funeral directors going, no, no, closes the lid on him. But I can only imagine the villain just walks away afterwards. It doesn't actually carry the coffin out to a plot and then dig him and put him in the ground. Right. Right. So all I can imagine is at this scene ends, he closes the coffin lid, and then the guy just pushes the coffin and then back open, continually screaming, no, no, no, no. That's probably true. There was another little dialogue sequence that I really enjoyed in here, which is about the morgue conversation that you talked about. So I did have a little thing in my notes about it, because we got random cutaways, where the police officers talking to a, you know, mortician or, you know, whatnot, about this killing and you know, how could a fan blade ever cut loose? It goes nowhere. The police really don't ever play a big role in this movie. But I love that the police officer just has his random statement. He doesn't believe in ghosts. He doesn't believe in things. He doesn't like superstition. And he just looks this corner. And he says, don't you don't forget about the Salem witch trials. Yeah, why? What? This is like, don't forget the Alamo. What are we doing here? That was a little out of left field. That's myself. Jesus Christ. What a fucking social justice warrior. This is like when you get into an argument with somebody at work, and you're just having like a normal argument. And they're like, you know, they smell bad or something. And they're like, Oh, and of course, you would point out the fact that we're having this discussion. And I'm a queer person. You're like, Okay, hold up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's not bring your bullshit into this. This is all offensive because somebody called you on your crap. Hold up there. I know you're very concerned with the plight of the witches at the Salem witch trial. Yeah, which is all been fucking taking care of at this point. We're good. But sure, sure, go on, go on yourself box. Back at the haunted house, Tina finds dead rats hanging from the rafters in the attic. She falls over screaming. A guillotine blade drops from the roof. And she is sliced in half. Down stairs, Susan is attacked by the clown doll. But it's just another illusion. At a nearby cemetery, Paul is trying to get answers when Martha's attacked by Velkos. She runs into the graveyard and hides in an old tomb that happens to belong to Henrietta. She screams, a mysterious dead hand grabs a lamp and knocks her unconscious. A few minutes later, Paul rescues her. The clown doll is pulling out all the stops to kill the remaining characters. Mark is dumped into a lake of ectoplasm and stabbed to death with a pair of gardening shears while Susan finds dead bodies and runs from a skeleton covered in maggots. Paul hears them screaming over the radio, grabs a gas can and sets Henrietta's corpse on fire. The skeleton, the little girl, and the clown doll all vanish. The house is clean. A few weeks later, Martha is walking through Boston to meet Paul for a date. She sees the clown doll sitting in a window display, its miles, the irritating music plays and Paul crosses the street in time to get hit by a bus. Martha screams. I'm going to get the easy thing out of the way first where several times in this movie, this clown doll has attacked somebody and made a menace of itself. And in this one, it was dispatched stupidly easily, which reiterates everything I've said about evil doll movies. They're not scary. Killer doll films are not you this thing is so easy to get rid of you just pick it up, flip the switch in the back from bad to good. Let's be done with the nonsense. You can get rid of a killer doll so quickly. And simply, I don't understand why people are afraid of them. Hey, look, this dog could do a lot of different things. If we look at this, look at this kill right in the beginning of the section. Tina's got the best kill. And if anybody's a little confused about how Tina can be up in the attic, see dead rats hanging from a rafter, fall over and get cut in half by a guillotine. You got to remember something. The 80s were a very different time. We weren't so obsessed with safetyism. So you could buy a nice house with a spacious attic that just happened to have a guillotine up there. Yeah, this if this is the little girls room that you can tell there's something clearly wrong with her. She's a little Wednesday Adam as much, you know what I mean? I am just picturing the realtor that is selling the place. This place is a real fix wrapper. But it has all the devices of old school execution mixed with a modern charm. The hot tub in the back doubles as a cauldron for death by boiling. The dining room table has a cheery finish, which will make it perfect for disembowelment. And and there are three chibits in the back, just in case you decide to have kids get teen in the playroom. Yeah, everything you could want for family. It's all everything you could ever want across her crucifixion. Thumb screws in the back. Oh, you can't buy them like you used to, huh? Which is funny because this kill is awesome. It's the glorious kill of the movie. And yet, like as only a true horror film can like a horror fan can understand. It's the one that maybe left the hardest. Oh, for sure. Because this is the epitome of low budget cinema. They wanted to show this kid get cut in half. They do a couple cut shots. You never see the blade go through her per se. You see the right body separate this nice dummy, I guess, or whatever they have, mannequin that they're using. And then it focuses in the foreground of the shot on, I think, a rocking horse or a dollhouse or something. Yeah, and behind that, you see two halves, the upper half and the lower half of this character, right off either side to make it look like she's suddenly nine feet tall, the way this thing cut her in half. It's hidden so well behind everything, but also hidden so poorly behind everything that it's exactly what sums up this movie to be as good as it is. Oh, yeah. Look, if this were toxic Avenger, too, I would think it was the greatest gore special effects ever, because part of the charm is how fake it looks. But in a movie like this, where it's actually trying to be scary. I mean, Jesus Christ, they might as well have leaves come out of her waist when they cut her. But they do land a couple of things here. I love in Italian horror, how when they do a kill, they'll always zoom in on somebody's face again, they want to maximize terror. I remember that in burial ground to where they really wanted to like show you that that made that poor maid slowly. Oh, right. Yes. But but like her reaction is great. It's just how slow the scene is. Yeah, it doesn't quite work. So that's what happens here, too. You get this great reaction from Tina, like, Oh, my God, ah, scary thing coming down at me. And then, of course, when I figured out it was a guillotine, I bought my fucking balls off. So Tina gets cut in half and then shows up again. Suddenly, when her sister realizes the bathroom sink has tic-mata. This ghost isn't even trying anymore. I know. It's not even trying. And then oh, no. Tina was the little evil cloud all the whole time. What a twist. Yes, exactly. There's a blink and you'll miss moment where she puts on her Walkman. And she starts listening to music. I just love the killer soundtracks. Oh, sure. These movies must have. And this one has it too, because it uses a lot of different, you know, music in it. There's a lot of different times to these characters like put on a headset and they'll listen to something. And this one, I can just tell you what some of these tracks are named. One is called rock song. The other is jazz song. The other is around the town song. The other is suspenseful song. Let's not forget this is a real banger. Whimsical curiosity song. Jump scare is coming song. This is the names of your playlist, not the song itself. I just I love when people listen to generic music in low budget horror films. It always strikes me so funny. And they always do it this way. And this movie does it too. Well, we have some punk rock character be like, I don't want to listen to you. I'm just going to listen to my music. And they put on their headphones here. But that's all they have the rights to is some music that you can get for free. She doesn't. It's not quite that bad. But she puts it on and it's like, it's like low level city jazz. It's something you'd hear in an elevator. Right. She's like, fuck you guys, I'm going to listen to my music. Or like music. Yeah. And also by the by for those who are unfamiliar with early technologies, these headphones from the Walkmans in the 1980s, it didn't have the noise cancellation stuff that we have nowadays. It was put them over your head. And if you wanted to drown people out, you had to destroy your eardrums with how loud you made that music. Right. She was not playing that music loud enough to not hear the scream for the other room. Sorry. Right. She is. She is literally it's literally blocking about 5% of what she can hear. Right. She might not be able to hear the water running in the sink. But that's about it. So now we're going to cut a lot between the graveyard where all this stuff is happening with Martha and Paul. And then this terrifying thing that's happening, you know, in the darkness with these people running around this house and the ghost is trying to kill the remaining characters that have stayed behind. I have a question for you. What time of day is it? Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know because they filmed this clearly throughout the course of two weeks at whatever time they could sneak into the cemetery to get it done. Yes. And it was various different points of the time and day and noon and winter and fall. I don't know. Every time we cut to the house, it is pitch black outside. And every time we cut to the graveyard, it is one of my favorite moments day for night. It is totally daytime 100% daytime with a nice blue hue over it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Because that is the easiest cheapest way to make nighttime happen in your film. Oh, exactly. And these characters are running around. They're practically wearing fucking sunscreen and visor hats. The sun is so bright outside. Cutting these events that are happening at the same time at this haunted house that's in total darkness. There's literally nothing about this film that makes sense in half of these shots. And I swear, some of it was filmed in September, then they had to take two months off filming again in November and just tried their best to match it as well as they could. But I don't know what to think about this final fight that happens because it's so crazy. It's kind of fun in its own right. It's just a ball to watch. You know, again, it's like the threesome and the howling to, you know, it's never cut and it's hilarious. The groundskeeper is chasing Martha through the cemetery, trying to destroy her ends up hanging from a tree. No explanation for that whatsoever. Now he's out of the picture. And then the house goes crazy, trying to kill everyone. Well, and the one of the best parts is that a character named Mark runs up to the ghost in the doll and then falls to the floor. Yeah. And then falls into a giant puddle or lake of ectoplasm. Is that what it is? Which is exactly what it looks like. Now, let's be clear what this movie is trying to do for anybody who's seen this movie. It's trying to do the Amityville Horror bit or it's trying to do the part with the pool in poltergeist. So it's trying to have, you know, the, you know, the Lutzdad, he crushes through the floor and he falls into like the black bloody ooze that is under the house. It's a great scene in the fantastic Amityville Horror. This is a lake of white goo. Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was a that of the stuff or a putrid milkshake or a bucket of cum. I don't know what he landed in. This looks less like a river of ectoplasm flowing under the house and the aftermath of the local circle jerkathon. Which by the way, when I when I thought of that, I thought to myself, I love the phrase, a thon as if someone got together and did it for the local fire department. And we lead to a brilliant scene here where he gets his way out of the goop stumbles his way upstairs. And then the the fucking stape off Marshall Mella man who looks like he survived a 72 hour Bikaki shows up. She stabs the fuck out of it. You know, when I watch some of these movies, I always try to think of like, what is the joke that everyone will make and like try to do that? What does the joke everybody will make? But it really does look like this guy came back from bangfest 25. It's true. He is just covered and come with you. I also we don't try to go for the low hanging fruit, but there's no other way to describe this the way they've made this put together. I know they were going for something like swamp thing, but they just went for just thing. That's all there was. I think I got some of my mouth like he was he was on the bad end of the circle jerkathon. That's right. That's right. He was in the center. Right. Exactly. Imagine what going door to door for that would be like. Oh, man. Terrible. I'm collecting for the local fire department. They need new access and we're having a circle jerkathon where for every minute I last you donate five cents. Could just be you or you can invite your friends. I have a long list, but don't worry. You won't be spending more than five or ten cents. Not known for my stamina. Oh, my God. However, much comments up on mark right here. We're gonna wait it and that's gonna be determined how much you owe for the circle jerkathon and cohesit Massachusetts. All right, everyone. Tell them if you if you want to send your donations or pictures of this event, please send them to a kind of a horror review at geocities.com. They're going to be sifting through all of that filth just for you. This is also, by the way, the moment as Martha's trying to leave this house and escape, where we see the hitchhiker has died. Yes, we don't get to see his death. We don't get a brilliant kill. She opens the door. He's standing there bloody. He falls over. And that's it. And I just have to say boo. Yes, the most annoying motherfucker in any film I've seen in a long time. I wanted to watch his grisly end and you didn't even give me that. And you could have had he could have had a great death. He could have had something that was fun or funny. But we all we really see is that basically earlier in the film, he just digs around for food. He just digs. I'm like, this, this has got to be a stereotype that just is making some people really upset. He's like, he's like walks it out. He's like, let's eat. It just grabs boxes of, you know, croutons that have been around for 25 years and starts digging around inside trying to eat something that he vanishes. And then his body is found dead. It's dumb. It's dumb. You owed us at least this man's kill anything. He would give us that fuck you. Right. But man, does this movie end on a banger? Because there are just two things that I want to reference first of all. So there's actually, I'm gonna give credit with credit to do. There's a cool prop in this movie, a wicked cool prop. And that for some reason, at some point in this movie, Susan, who's like the final person that hasn't been killed in this house, gets chased by an amazing looking skeleton. No idea where this came from, no idea what it is. It feels very city of the living dead to me. Yeah, this dude shows up in a maggot ridden skull mask looking like he clearly was on his way to a misfits concert but got lost on the wrong set. But it looks awesome nonetheless. And I want to give credit for that. It looks great. Cool. If there'd been a movie where they were fighting off like an army of those, I'd be like this, this is awesome. This is some grimy Italian horror shit that I want to watch like this looks cool. Yeah, they've given us more of that during the film. I would have been a lot more interested. Yeah. So I'll give credit where credits do that creature looks cool. Don't know what that creature is. Don't know why it just appeared at this point in the movie. Don't know where the ghost dog went. Don't know where anything is happening. But but that effect is cool. But man, oh man, I I'm kicking myself a little bit because I have a feeling that I want what I'm about to describe and I'll see if I can find it for the show notes and put it in there. But I do feel like there is something that is totally a visual joke that I'm going to describe anyway, because it is so fucking funny. And it is the point where Paul runs and grabs a gas can and goes into the tomb, pours gasoline on the body of Henrietta and the clown doll and then sets them ablaze, which is of course what ends up like killing the ghost and saving the day. But when I say that the ghosts in the house and all the things that are attacking disappear, I want to be very clear what I mean, which is that if you were looking at the strip of film that this movie was made on, there are 30 slices of film where Henrietta and that clown doll are. And then the next 30, they're just not there. Because that's how they do the disappearance sequence. There's no magic, there's no fading, there's no lightning bolts, no nothing. They're just no longer in the film like they were deleted. And I really hope that I can find footage of this because it's so unintentionally funny. Oh yeah, I think the best way to describe it is like a dream of genie, where she blinks her eyes and something just goes away. Yes, exactly. That's exactly how it looks. Yes. Just gone. Just fucking gone. Right. Like I looked around my own house. Am I is my mind going like I just lose these people? It's not a slow fade. It's not a cross dissolve. It's no nothing just gone. They're just gone. Exactly. Which is incredible filmmaking. Well done. Right. Exactly. What do you think of the end of this movie? Are we talking about the actual end of it? Yeah, the actual last two minutes. I gotta say fucking Martha and Tim or what the hell his name was? Paul, Paul, go back to Boston. They're having a normal life. She sees the clown doll in the window of a store, which by the way, in that area of town is very posh. They would not have that doll in that window. Just putting it out there. That's like Newbury Street area. Right. Right. That creepy ass fucking doll in that window. That doll would have had a designer bag that was $1,000. That's where all the expense of the movie went is to agree to put that doll in the window for five minutes for this film. Right. It's like, that's like Versace. Anyway, dolls there, but it's got like diamond encrusted shoes. That's right. So the doll is in the fucking window. Martha notices it. She screams. The thing gives a wicked smile. Then there's Paul across the street going, Hey, Martha runs into the road and gets hit by a bus. She screams again. Credits. That is literally the best way you could have ended this movie. Just run over the bus and roll credits. The only thing that would have been better is he had gotten down one knee and proposed to her and then he Oh, God. This is so unintentionally funny. So tell me, my dear friend, what did you think of ghosts? We'll quick decide, by the way, there was a moment where I thought about doing this movie for your birthday. Thank you for not doing that. This is terrible, but it's the right kind of terrible. And I don't think I'm enjoying as much that phrase. It's so bad. It's good because I think people are overplaying that and using it in the wrong areas. Having said that, it would qualify for exactly that. If I wanted to have a movie night with my friends where we sit around and riff tracks on a movie, this is it. If I wanted to introduce somebody to horror, who was new to the genre, this would be an introductory film. This is like, start here. See how you like that. Getting past that Italian horror is always fucking great in that when it's on, it's all on and it's a gore-fest. When it's off, yikes. That's that's what this movie was. The bits that were on were fucking amazing. And the bits that weren't were putting me to sleep. That's what you get with the style of film. You got to go and knowing that. And it's it's a hard movie to talk about because things definitely happened in this movie, but they don't follow any sense or logic. It's more like a series of baffling events than an actual plot. I've enjoyed a lot of Italian horror, some pretty bad ones. Sometimes wondered how bad could they really get? This is your answer. This is it right here. I think not in a disparaging way. But when you're talking about the list of Italian horror, this is at top, this is the bottom. This one's on the bottom. This is the low grade of it here. But it's still fun. It is weirdly still fun as dumb as it is as boring as it is. It's still fucking fun. And that's crazy because we talk a lot about films that the greatest thing is that they're boring. And this one's so boring that I literally dozed off during it three fucking times. And yet I still found it fun. So it's a it's a strange amalgamation of those two balances. There may have been enough creepy and scary things to get by in this movie. If it wasn't for all the people that this movie was happening to. I don't know else to put it than that. But the biggest problem is that the characters failed to convince as human beings. It's not just the acting. It's that's not helping their cause. But it's the dialogue, the absence of chemistry, the fact that everything they do feels like a story requirement rather than a decision that an actual person would make. And in many ways, frankly, the stupid clown doll is the best realized character in the film. And that says a lot about the fucking film. So it's weird. I don't know how to describe it. It's very fucking dull and boring, but also fun and crazy. And I didn't regret watching it as much as it made fun of it. But I probably wouldn't sit down to it again, unless it was in a fun group setting with my friends. Man, you and I totally agree on this movie. And not just literally the letter grade of this movie, but everything you said about it like we couldn't possibly agree more. This film is weirdly boring at certain parts. And then so much fun in other parts that it totally makes it worthwhile. And that is a strange conundrum. The part where the glasses are exploding, and as a severed head in the washing machine, that was all a fucking blast. I was having a ball during that and all those parts that are so bad, they're good with the fan blade and cutting the guy's neck and him. Help me help me. Dear God, no, help me. You know, that's all so funny and fun. But there is a way that this movie just drags in like the third quarter of the film, where the they try to start solving the mystery and everybody keeps showing up at the house and leaving the house and showing up at the house and leaving the house and going here and going there and doing this and doing that. As they're trying to figure out what's going on and justify why they're all still staying there, it just does drag the movie down, which could have made it a rock and roll nightmare, a evil tunes like a movie that's just really fun to watch, even though it is not a good movie by the measure of what makes a film good. It's not a good movie like like teeth or like the hills of eyes or anything like that. Those are good movies. And so this right here is a very strange one, because you'll have an absolute blast. And then the movie just kind of dies down. There's a great moment about, like I said, three quarters of the way in where like everybody can go up and go to the bathroom and get popcorn, come back and have missed nothing. Like missed absolutely nothing. And my compliments for this movie are kind of sparse, you know, an effect here looks cool, the skull thing at the end looks cool, you know, just little things like that. And yet this is one of those great discovery films that is kind of charming and weird in its own right. It's one of those movies that I feel like once you've seen, you can't unsee it. I've talked about this with burial ground where that movie now that I've seen it, it just kind of shows up for me in life. It just kind of shows up in these weird places. It will somebody will reference it and be like, wait a minute, have we both seen this weird movie? I feel like that's going to be ghost house for me. I feel like it's going to be a movie that if you're kind of in the know, and you kind of love B movies and bad horror movies, and you're really willing to get into the drugs that stuff and go far past movies like, you know, like The Rome, which is a great bad movie, but everybody knows it, you know, and different things like that. So I feel like it's going to offer me a lot of value in this. Interesting fact, by the way. So this movie is called La Casa in in Italy, and it's called La Casa three. This is a fact I saved for the end of this because I think you'll absolutely love it. I know this. So you know it. I'll save it for the audience, which I'll tell it for the audience. So so it's called La Casa three, which is something that is common for just really shitty horror films anywhere, anywhere in the world where they rename these horror films. So they have either catchy or title, or they look like they're connected to some other franchise that they're not connected to. Leo, would you like to reveal what La Casa one and La Casa two are? Because copyrights are different in foreign countries, and especially back in this time when they could get away with a little bit of fudgery. La Casa one and two are actually evil dead one and two. So in some bizarre world, this is the third movie in the evil dead franchise in Italy, which is actually fascinating. Because if I remember right, there are five sequels to La Casa. It went they kept throwing that name on everything. Yep. And army of darkness was actually the fifth or sixth one in the line. So it wasn't even the third one in the evil dead French. The fourth one is actually on my list. We will actually be covering La Casa four. Can you imagine being the person that watched evil dead two? And there was like, let's put on La Casa three. And then it's this this is this. I was actually debating whether or not I was going to bring up that trivia because I didn't want this to technically be our first coverage of evil dead. Right. Right. We've now covered a movie in the evil dead franchise. Hey, look, I'll count a bloody muscle. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah, if you want a movie that actually should be in the evil dead franchise, watch bloody bustle and stuff. That was amazing. Agreed. All right, everybody. Hey, I want to do a quick shout out real quick. So before we go, I wanted to say something because we couldn't have our friends a cut above on for this episode. But at the same time, I thought of something independently that I just wanted to throw out there as a compliment to them. Everybody, if you're not listening to their show, go listen to their show, because the show is great. We love their show. We've always loved their show. But I got to just throw out a compliment to our friend, Heidelberg, who is producing the shit out of that show. He has been putting in a ton of work to some cool editing in the beginning and some cool editing at the end. And you know, you know, I know more than Leo how hard editing the show is. Oh, yeah. If he could have punched me in the face. One day, I'm going to be like, Oh, I'm ill. I can't you have to edit it. Go. Yeah, that works for you. Just one long stream of consciousness. You guys have no idea how much I clean this shit up anyway. Uncensored version stay on uncensored version. We have a whole we have a third member of the show. We just never we just never include him. That's our friend Ryan. That's our friend. So you vote his name. Now we got to get it back on. Hydroberg is doing a great job editing the show and producing the shit out of that show. So we've been on eight or nine episodes recently. And he's edited out of all of them. So he's done a great job. Go listen to his show. And you know, this to other people on that show. But who cares? So they keep rotating in and out. It doesn't matter. They've never had the same people. Whatever. They just say their names are John and Jackie Jacqueline. Yeah, every week they get those names, but they're not it's just Hydroberg. It's a Hydroberg show playing all the voices. Anyway, this was supposed to be a compliment. I think it still kind of is for us. Yeah. We're really good at complimenting others and making ourselves. Go listen to this show. They're great. Late night with the devil was an excellent episode. Otherwise, we'll catch you all later for what do we do next week? What are we doing next week next week? We are watching trick or treat. And by that, I don't mean the thing with the series of different stories and the little fucking pump scarecrow kid, whatever. Fuck that movie. We're watching the actual trick or treat from 1980s that has Gene Simmons and Aussie Osborne in it. And it's brilliant. And it's amazing. And we're gonna watch it. Right. So I'm looking forward to that movie because I've never seen it before. So we will see you next week for trick or treat. Bye. [Music] [Music] [Music]
