qmtv Excellent B Movie. Great atmosphere, story, gore, cinematography, OK acting This movie has great atmosphere and cinematography, and decent story and acting. That alone makes it a solid B movie. All unlikable characters. All die. Solid editing. Gore was great. The acting was OK, not great but very workable.Best part: When the thieves kill the old couple and their groundskeeper. They didn't mean to kill them, but it happened. They were in shock. Great stuff!Rating is a B, for a B movie. Or 8. 10 given for all the loser reviews.

Kaliyugaforkix ** Lucio Fulci was renowned for his gore-soaked, entrail-laden spaghetti epics, held in particular regard by some of us, accustomed to watered- down, assembly line slashers and their endless line of sequels as the totality of the horror flick experience. Dreamy and incoherent as well as repulsive & palpable, Lucio's movies are an acquired taste. To accuse him of being liberal with narrative is putting it lightly. In the world according to the maestro, insane strokes of bad luck strike with the disfavor of a sadistic god; guard dogs rip your throat out, cellar walls collapse onto hell-mouths, and jealous father's power drill craniums with demented glee. It's a mad, mad world of grisly freak accidents, usually of the supernatural variety & mankind is little more than playthings. Such a uniformed unconformity to the strictures of plot and even common sense have been used as ammunition for criticisms, but I find his wacky gutter-surrealism charming. I've had enough cookie cutter story lines and half baked scare tactics to last a lifetime. Unpredictability & restraint will never be an issue with a Fulci film and we should be glad. House of Clocks is like this. Three thugs decide to rob an elderly couple's estate and end up murdering the occupants when it all goes haywire. However, when the hundreds of clocks adorning the mansion begin running backwards, time itself begins to unravel and the victims return to life, turning the tables on their accosters with interesting results.Logic is conservatively adhered to throughout this scattershot tale, and Fulci has his usual schlock gore on hand to spice it up, though not nearly at the strength of his earlier classics, sadly. Though clearly upper tier output from his awful final phase, the inspired nihilistic vision of the early 80's just isn't there. Unfortunately too, the photography has a hazy indistinctness which apparently is a trademark of his later work, but that's small potatoes compared to the horrible dubbing which saddles the actors with ill-suited voices (like a lot of Italian genre movies) that over and under accentuate sentences constantly and sound like parodies of their respective characters.The real delight of this bizarre little ditty is the elderly duo, presented as polite, thoroughly insane geriatrics. These are your kindly grandparents filtered through the Italian sleaze ethic: upon graciously accepting the resignation of their maid, the old lady casually picks up a wooden pole and impales the woman, twisting with glee and watching her intestines un-loop .She then tosses off her gardening gloves and sashays out of the greenhouse(!?). Such throwaway moments of off-the-wall tastelessness (the screen writer also penned House on the Edge of the Park) ensure House of Clocks is, if you can stomach the slow-pacing, a decent time killer. But there are no earth shattering gore operatics here.

jaibo Certainly not one of Fulci's greatest films, and definitely one which runs out of steam before the end, House of Clocks is nevertheless well worth seeing for its striking central conceit and the title location itself, a sinister Gothic mansion full of clocks of impressive and odd old clocks. The mansion is owned by a crazy old couple who murder their relatives and servants when they fail to live up to their standards. A trio of trash decide to do a home invasion on these weird old coves, and get a lot more than they bargained for.At an important point in the story, the old couple are killed and their clocks stop when they die (like My Grandfather's clock!); then they start running backwards. The dead are resurrected and the killers get killed. Or do they, as time keeps spinning back and forth, in and out of dream-time. The film finally suggests that time is not linear, can flow (as the quantum physicists tell us) in either direction, but in Fulci's unnerving vision in all directions is a violent death. Not that any of the characters deserve much better, as this every-which-way time travel is entirely populated by monsters. Some of them are old and rich, some of them are poor and young; all of them are irredeemably nasty.La Casa nel tempo is certainly hokey at times, and the currently available UK DVD is appallingly dubbed - but there's more going on here than in your average B movie horror, some of it is lovingly filmed (mostly the clocks), there's some campy laughs and some truly gory moments. Give it a go, if you've got the time...

adriangr If you're still interested in watching any late 1980's movies by gore master Lucio Fulci, chances are you might want to add this to your list. Well, don't. It's another total turkey. As far as I can see, Fulci started a downward slide with "Manhattan Baby", and never recovered. I have seen "Aenigma" (a joke) "Touch of Death" (pitiful), "A Cat in the Brain" (nonsensical), "Voices From Beyond (snoozefest), and even sat through "The Ghosts of Sodom" (run as far as you can from this abomination), so I have no-one else to blame but myself for even giving "House of Clocks" a try. The plot is roughly this: An elderly couple inhabit a large mansion, and they are more than a little eccentric, by which I mean that from the very outset they are both seen to have homicidal tendencies! Into this situation drop three young petty criminals who have designs on stealing some loot from the treasure laden house. The twist is that the treasures of the house are all clocks, and when the violent youths meet the crazy old couple, the clocks themselves play a big part in what happens next... OK so what's wrong with this movie? Well basically, most of it. As with all of Fulci's later works it's hampered by everything that could possibly make a passable horror movie into a disaster. The acting is really poor. I've never seen such amateurish mugging and wailing as we get here from the three central youngsters. They are just terrible. A really, REALLY bad dubbing job only makes things worse, and English speaking dubbing team don't seem to have a clue about matching dialogue up to lip movements, there is barely a moment when the cast look like they are using their own voices. The elderly couple are just as bad, even though they don't ham it up, they are lumbered with an equally hopeless dub job. Sadly, the list of shame goes on. The direction and camera work are totally uninspired. Fulci has a few trademark images that he continues to roll out over and over again. Cameras mount staircases, zoom in on shadows or doorknobs, jump rapidly in focus from foreground to background and back again, etc etc. I've seen all these tricks a hundred times and the novelty has long since worn off. Worse still, the effects are now beyond lame. All the gore scenes (brief and not very explicit) are really poor, the effects are very shoddy and they just don't work. The non-gore special effects are equally terrible, and sadly this film relies on a few trick shots for important scenes, all of which are botched. It's like Fulci doesn't know how to make anything pass for realistic, or just doesn't care. But the very worst offender of all is the plot. Oh my god. Words fail me in trying to explain what's going on here. The film has a major supernatural twist and from the moment that everything in the house goes pear shaped (you'll know when), the film just unravels totally. Nothing works, nothing makes sense, nothing gets explained. Don't think I am just not getting it. I love surreal cinema and being made to think. But this is an insult. As stupid event followed stupid event I was almost laughing, but by the time the end credits rolled, I was wondering how this was ever passed off as serious entertainment, it's such a mess it's just not funny. Take my advice and don't go near this. I'm sorry to be so negative about Lucio Fulci when he has produced some of the genre's finest shockers, but his later films never repeated the success of the golden days, and this is just another example of him churning out pot-boilers when he had long since lost the ability or interest in making a good product.