From director Umberto Lenzi (using the riotous Americanized pseudonym of Humphrey Humbert) comes this dopey, low grade, but engagingly dumb haunted house flick.
Things begin with a prologue of young Henrietta (Kristen Fougerousse) being chastised by her father for butchering the family cat, and then being locked in the cellar. Soon after the parents are brutally murdered. Flash forward 21 years, and HAM radio operator Paul (Greg Scott) picks up radio signals of what sounds like people being terrorized. He traces the signals to an isolated manor, meeting up with other young adults. Soon these unfortunate souls are set upon by the demonic forces residing within the walls.
A banal script (by Cinthia McGavin), truly silly dialogue (by Sheila Goldberg), lame attempts at horror, and some delicious moments of gory violence combine in this enjoyably bad movie. The acting is likewise lousy from most everybody concerned, although it's nice, as it always is, to see the great character actor Donald O'Brien (a.k.a. Dr. Butcher, M.D.) as a hilariously unsubtle, menacing axe-wielding caretaker.
The young actors *are* attractive, in any event. Lara Wendel of Dario Argento's "Tenebre" is top billed as she plays Paul's girlfriend Martha. The adult performers don't fare much better, but there are some great character faces among them: William J. Devany as a detective, Alain Smith as Henrietta's father, Robert Champagne as a mortician.
The music, by Piero Montanari, is very bad, but amusingly so, while cinematographer Franco Delli Colli works to give the movie a decent look. At least "La Casa 3" ("La Casa 1" and "La Casa 2" being the Italian titles for the first two "Evil Dead" movies) gets much mileage out of a creepy clown doll, much like "Poltergeist" did six years previous.
Filmed in the same house as Lucio Fulci's "The House by the Cemetery".
Six out of 10.
