All Rise...

Judge Patrick Naugle's house is the creepy one all the neighborhood kids throw rocks at.

Editor's Note

Our review of Witchery, published January 25th, 2007, is also available.

The Charge

Two…two…two creeps in one!

The Case

In Ghosthouse, a group of young, mildly attractive teenagers are called to a deserted house by a radio transmission. The house has long since been abandoned because something went terribly wrong there years ago. As the group of youngsters start looking around and checking things out, strange occurrences begin to transpire including the appearance of a little girl in a white dress carrying a creepy looking clown doll. Will the group make it out alive of the terror that is the Ghosthouse?

In Witchery we meet Gary (David Hasselhoff, Knight Rider) and his girlfriend Linda (Catherine Hickland, TV's One Life To Live) who head off for a visit off the Massachusetts coast. They end up on an island with some other potential real estate investors who find that the island may house more than just land: there appears to be a real live witch in their midst! One by one the visitors of the island start to meet terrifying fates as they most contend with the curse of the Witchery!

Ghosthouse was apparently an Italian sequel to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II, which is a real shame because that makes it all the more egregious of a trespass—viewing Ghosthouse against Evil Dead II is like comparing The Godfather to Hot Dog: The Movie: it's not even close.

I was not scared by director Uberto Lenzi's tepid Ghosthouse. I felt no tension, no spine tingling, no hairs standing up on the back of my neck. What I did feel was boredom, one of the worst feelings you can have during a horror movie. Are you scared by slow-motion scenes of glass jars exploding? How about light bulbs melting? Or maybe a furnace spitting fire? If so, you're in luck! Ghosthouse features many scenes like this, which would be terrifying if you were, oh, say Bob Villa.

Unlike Witchery (which I'll discuss momentarily), Ghosthouse doesn't feature any famous faces. All of the actors in this film are…terrible. Just really bad. Line delivery is like watching someone read the script for the first time without any context to the rest of the movie. Actors yell their lines at each other without regard for what the response of the other characters is. At one point a character who has hitched a ride in the backseat of a couple's car scares them using a fake skeleton hand. The driver and his female passenger are annoyed with him but he seems oblivious to how angry they are. The more angry they get, the more indifferent he becomes. It's as if everyone's acting out a different script.

Gorehounds and horror enthusiasts will find little to love about Ghosthouse. There some blood and violence but it's all of the standard variety type; creatively the film's special effects sequences feel bankrupt, as if little imagination was put into the effects work, except for a scene where a character ends up nearly drowning in a pool of what appears to be vanilla yogurt…yes, the scariest thing in this movie is a dairy product.

Ghosthouse fails on many levels: it's not the least bit frightening, it makes no sense, and the story is a rip off of so many other films that came before it (including but not limited to Poltergeist, Evil Dead, and The Omen). In other words, this Ghosthouse needs to be shuttered permanently.

This leads us to Witchery (titled as "Witchcraft" in the opening titles), which at least features recognizable actors like Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff. This doesn't necessarily mean that things are any better than Ghosthouse, just…you'll actually recognize the people that are reciting the terrible dialogue.

Much like Ghosthouse, Witchery sort of just plods along throwing pieces of story and plot against the wall in the hope that some of it sticks. The acting is marginally better, but not by a very wide margin. David Hasselhoff plays a horny beefcake boyfriend who lectures his significant other on how terrible it is she's a virgin at her age (because nothing gets a girl hotter than telling her your a chilly prude). Linda Blair plays a pregnant woman who sometimes gets possessed, which must have reminded her that a movie like Witchery is a looooong way off from a movie like The Exorcist. It was also nice to see Annie Ross pop up, a woman who holds a warm spot in my heart because of her work the far superior Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3.

There are plot holes the size of Jupiter in Witchery, but I suppose that comes with the territory. Director Fabrizio Laurenti (The Crawlers) shoots everything with all the excitement of a Tide laundry detergent commercial while Carli Maria Cordio and Randy Miller's film score pounds you over the head with cheesy 80's straight-to-VHS musical cues. As ridiculous as Witchery is, I can safely say it's the better of the two double feature titles, although that's like saying Porky's II: The Next Day is better than Porky's Revenge.

Both Ghosthouse and Witchery are presented in 1.66:1 widescreen in 1080p high definition. Scream Factory has come to the rescue of two films that, well, probably didn't need much rescuing but here they are anyway. The transfers for each film are about the same (both were released the same year), with far better colors and black levels than they deserve. Both transfers are mostly clear of any major defects, including scratches or print imperfections. The soundtrack for both films is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 Mono in English. Not surprisingly, there isn't a lot to these audio tracks—they're mostly front heavy mixes without any directional effects or surround sounds. Also included with these films are optional English subtitles, which I was hoping would help the movies make more sense, but no.

The only extra features included on this disc are two theatrical trailers, one for Ghosthouse and one for Witchery.

The Verdict

The scariest thing about this demonic double feature is that it was released at all.

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