Michael_Elliott House of Lost Souls (1989) * 1/2 (out of 4)The fourth and final film in the "House" pictures that were made for Italian television (two by Lucio Fulci and two by Umberto Lenzi). This one centers on a group of friends who have to stay at a junky hotel after the road they're traveling on gets closed. It doesn't take long for strange things to begin happening and of course this leads to death.Lenzi directed THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT as well as this one and I guess the best thing you can say about this film is the fact that it's better than the other one he directed. Yeah, that's really not much of a recommendation but these two films show exactly why Italian horror was dying off. Their releases in America had already stopped and it's clear that they didn't have the budgets needed to make the type of film that fans would expect.In all honesty, the story here isn't original but at the same time I think it would have been a lot of fun had it been made in 1980 instead of 1989. I say that because earlier in the decade Lenzi would have been given a budget for special effects and I'm sure we would have gotten some classic death scenes. All of the death scenes here are poorly done or they're not even on the screen. Most of them contain very little blood and there's just nothing memorable about them.What's worse is that the characters are all annoying, the performances are rather bad and there's certainly not tension in the film. Lenzi's direction seems like he's just going through the motions as there's no style or anything else for that matter. HOUSE OF LOST SOULS is a pretty poor movie that just shows how far the genre had fallen.

Leofwine_draca Another in the series of mostly-forgotten "haunted house" genre flicks, made for Italian television in 1989. This one is directed by former genre master Umberto Lenzi, who hasn't, it seems, lost his touch for delivering some unexpected scenes of gratuitous gore, a few effective shocks, and plenty of cheesy Italo style. The plot is total rubbish, of course, and the acting is equally bad. This is primarily a film to appeal to genre fans who know what to expect: a few, choice moments of gore to liven up the otherwise predictable proceedings. Much of the film consists of the boring characters being chased round a house by a variety of lost souls, including an old woman, a mute man, a Tibetan monk (!), and plenty of other fun bits. Spiders show up to menace a kid, music and a plot device is stolen from DEMONS, and Lenzi seems to be enjoying himself here.The film is fairly gory in its depiction of a series of beheadings, the highlight being where the annoyingly obnoxious little kid loses his noggin in a washing machine, of all places! The dumb waiter decapitation is the only worthwhile shock the film offers, although some other scenes are handled very well on a low budget (the dream/nightmare opening sequence and the finale, where the lost souls mass to attack the living, in particular). Hardly a great movie, but Italian fans should know what to expect from these.

bobjohnson994 Do you have any nostalgia for those 80s horror movies that make no sense whatsoever? Then you will enjoy this movie.The plot devices they use keep people in the thick of it are stretched beyond all imagining, but where would the movie go if all the characters just left? So we can at least be amused by this. Three people experience nightmarish visions? I know, let's investigate further! (lol) Then there is the hard driving amped up pop soundtrack, so different from the somber mood of the 70s horror.I will not give away any of the plot devices, but late in the movie, something supernatural happens at the hotel to keep the people from leaving. When you see it you will think "if something can do that, why didn't they just drop a piano on them the moment they walked in the door? xD

trashgang Can it get any worser to understand it all? i mean, just look at the release of Ghosthouse (1988). It had an good script but was also called La Casa 3 clocking in on Evil Dead's success. Then came Ghosthouse 2 but that's a title used for a few different flicks and wasn't directed by Lenzi and had nothing to do with the original one. Here I just watched what they call in Germany Ghosthouse 3. But it has again nothing to do with Ghosthouse, in fact it should be called La Casa 5 but it doesn't. It's just one of the fourth part of the series "Le case maledette" (Doomed Houses) also including La dolce casa degli orrori, La casa nel tempo and La casa del sortilegio.Again, as so many Italian flicks this is pure trash and just look at how it was made, it looked much older, it even looks as a seventies release. The effects were again dull and laughable. But this time a few killings did happen all as decapitations. The most notorious one the one with the laundry machine. Nevertheless it's again low on every part. It's so strange that a man like Lenzi could make such supernatural trash. The ghosts are just real people that are standing there with wooden performances and thats' what most of the acting is. Some did make it into the Italian scene. Okay, it was a television release but still from someone who made Cannibal Ferox this is trash. Gore 1/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5