Bezenby After the first few minutes of re-watching this film, I thought I'd been a bit harsh on it. It looked great, had a really excellent opening scene, and seemed to have all the Fulci trademarks out there loud and proud. Then those damn kids turned up and the whole film turned into a pile of crap.One night, two people arrive at their house after a night out, talking complete boll*cks about this and that, and discussing their children, wherever they are at the time. After getting themselves geared up for a bit of filthy squeezy, they discover the world's worst burglar, who proceeds to smash the guy's brains out and do a bit of good old eyeball removal on the lady (just like Ghosthouse and Killing Birds), then for good measure, he smashes in the guy's face with a poker. He then wraps the corpses in sheets, chucks them in a car, chucks the car over a cliff, then burns the sheets. So far, so Italian horror film.We then switch to the funeral, where Auntie and Uncle (don't ask me to remember their names) are in attendance with the recently orphaned kids, and I'm no doctor but these two kids are seriously bi-polar. One minute they're crying their eyes out, and the next they're laughing their arses off at the priest getting a fly on his nose. Also, Lino Salemme (Demons, Delerium) shows up as Guido the caretaker, looking pretty guilty.So off we go back to the house, with Aunt and Uncle, and Auntie doesn't like the house one bit. For starters, there's all sorts of creepy crap going on in the attic, and the kids aren't acting too sane either. They invite a real estate agent over to value the house, whom the kids call Mr Sausage. He's trying to walk up a flight of stairs when the ghosts of Mum and Dad cause him to fall, which makes the kids bust a guy laughing, even after Auntie tells them off.They kids also start to creep out Guido, who starts hallucinating bloody sheets everywhere, which gives us an extended version of what happened at the start of the film (probably also to give us some gore, which this film is sorely lacking). Of course, Guido was the murderer at the start (and that's no spoiler as we kind of know this anyway) and the ghosts drive him insane and to his death.For some reason (and "For Some Reason" would make a great alternative title for this film) Fulci decides to do this in the middle of the film, which leaves us with roughly forty five minutes of film left with these two kids and their parents. The parents, by the way, periodically turn up as crappy, giggling flames that dance around the place while the son wants them to come back from the moon while crying his eyes out before laughing his ass off. Jesus.Aunt, like the audience by this point, has had enough of this crap and wants out of the house, so we get another scene of grievous bodily harm being enacted on Mr Sausage while the kids roll about on the floor laughing. The parents also turn up as ghosts so now you get some cheeseball smooshy family stuff with the family (and dog! The family dog comes back too for some reason!) running around laughing and talking in Conquest-style reverbed voices while Aunt and Uncle arrange for an exorcist to show up.Also For Some Reason, some glowing rocks appear outside of the house. The exorcist tries his best to rid the ghosts of the house and then Mr Sausage turns up with a bulldozer and then it goes haywire and then the exorcist picks up one of those rocks and then his hand melts and then the kids crack up and then the film ends and then Fulci's ghost comes out of your television like Ring and batters you around the head with a baseball bat before pointing and laughing at you for three hours.I've watched nineteen Fulci films from Lizard in a woman's skin up until Demonia and this is by far the worst. In addition, I've recently been watching every Italian horror I can get my hands on from 1985 up until the industry died a death roughly around the mid nineties, and this is the worst of them too! Sometimes I think something gets lost in translation with these films, but here I have no idea what Fulci was aiming for with this one – It's like a horror comedy with extreme gore that is neither scary or funny. Or makes any sense. Looks good though. Next up: Ratman!

Sandy Petersen Let me establish my credits. I am by no means anti-Fulci. I adore the man, and I love his films. Even his lesser trash like House of Clocks and Aenigma appeal to me. I sorely regret his premature death from diabetes.That said, there is truth in the statement that "In Fulci's movies, the scenes that are unwatchable for being too gory are separated by scenes that are unwatchable for being too artsy." The problem with the awesomely named "Sweet House of Horror" is that it includes Fulci's "artsy" bent (though without his usual skill) but leaves entirely off his "gory" tendencies (admittedly, in a TV movie he was probably shackled to some extent).M. R. James once explained that for a ghost story to be good, it had to include three things. First, the story had to take place somewhere reasonable, so the reader could imagine himself present. Second, the story should not use the psychic jargon of the moment, which spoils horror and turns it into technical chat. Third, the ghost should be malign - a friendly ghost doesn't frighten.Sweet House of Horrors fails on all three counts. First, the tale is in a huge old mansion inhabited by two of those cute Italian blond children hampered only by a congenital inability to act. What is it with Italian directors? Can they not tell when a kid can't act? And why are they almost always blondies? I know for a fact that Italy has some brunettes. The kids' evil aunt and uncle plot to murder them to seize the family inheritance for their own. The plot makes no real sense, because the aunt and uncle are the kids' guardians, so presumably they have access to the money already. Plus, as guardians, how hard would it be to pull off a boat accident or whatever? But no other Italian film-maker worth his salt cared about logic, so let's move on.The second topic - don't mess with psychic jargon, is violated again and again. We get all sorts of "rules" and "vibrations" and scenes of the parents appearing. But here the Italian tendency to ignore logic serves the movie well, since the jargon conflicts with itself and is impossible to make heads or tails of, so it really doesn't violate James' rule all that strongly.The third topic is where the movie really falls down. The ghosts are the kids' parents, whose only goal is to protect them from the evil relatives. We learn this very early in the movie, and from then on we are completely without any terror at any moment. When the ghosts appear, we know it is only to pick on the evil aunt and uncle, whom we hate already. The only moments of tension are when auntie (or uncle) try to harm the kids, in a normal, physical fashion (like poisoning them). But these moments aren't too bad, because we know the ghosts will save the kids, and the move has no gore or strong scenes anyway.This last is especially appalling given Fulci's previous track record in being perfectly willing to endanger or even kill kids - this added a lot of suspense, shock, and horror to his previous movies. Remember the zombie girl in The Beyond? Or the threatened little boys in House by the Cemetery or City of the Walking Dead? Hell, Fulci wiped out a whole passel of kids in Don't Torture A Duckling. Those films were solid, scary, masterworks. But the limpwristed Hollywood sensibility in Sweet House of Horror keeps us from being scared, just as we know in any Hollywood movie that no kid is ever going to be harmed, we know it here.The movie is also not saved by Fulci's normal knack for scene-setting. His skill in putting together an image displayed in Massacre Time or Zombi is just completely absent. The movie has a pallid washed-out fuzzy look that just enervates every single moment. It is tedious to get through.I literally would recommend EVERY other Fulci movie above this one. Even such turds as Demonia and Conquest. At least those movies had a couple of good moments. Sweet House of Horror has none.

Joe Ebbasi Of all the cheaply made films I've ever seen this has the most ludicrous conclusion I've ever seen. I'm not sure if the film ever had any proper script but the way the narrative is bizarrely severed at a point when an adequate conclusion was completely viable indicates that the money had run out. There was no money left to pay for fuel for the digging machine and no money left to pay the actors. There was, however, enough money to pay for a rubber hand and a blowtorch to position out of shot to melt the hand. In the context of what went before this finale there is absolutely no meaning in this moment. At a huge stretch: the power of the spirits of the dead parents of the two (f***ing irritating!) children is so strong that they cannot be driven from the house and this is most aptly manifested by the incredible heat generated by the glowing rocks they are capable of inhabiting. How this proves conclusive is lost on me. The general premise of the film is that the spirits of the couple who are brutally murdered (a gentle head slamming for him; a meticulous face-mashing with some kind of kitchen implement for her) at the beginning are present in their house, now inhabited by their children, an aunt and an uncle. They gradually ramp up their efforts to stop the house being sold to a fat real estate agent (so important he has his own chauffeur-drive Mercedes), exorcised by an extra from Moby Dick or demolished by a swarthy, mulleted Italian in a digger. They do this through various incredible methods, such as moving a stair so that the real estate agent takes a tumble and breaks a leg (that only seems to require bandaging), making a demolition digger spin uncontrollably, lifting a jeep off the ground to stop it leaving the grounds with the children and heating up the real estate dude's crutch so that it violently burns his hand and reduces him to a Kermit the Frog voiced wreck. The spirits appear as two flames, a blue shred of spectral vapour, glowing pebbles, a toy fly and in the original human image of the mother and father. The coherence of the whole thing is hindered massively by the dreadful dubbing into English of the children's voices. They babble unintelligibly throughout and matters aren't helped by their constant sobbing and idiotic laughter. The film's other dialogue is generally awkward and unconvincing, characterised by that unnatural tone common of many dubbed films. Despite this, I feel that the narrative would remain disjointed and illogical even if delivered in its original language. Without a window into the children's joint psyche we are unable to contextualise their part in the events inside the house. Are they just weird kids, playing up because they've been orphaned or is there supposed to be an undertone of supernatural insight to their cruel and eerie behaviour? It's unclear. One is left with a desire for the aunt and uncle to leave the little oddities in the house with their spirit parents and get away from the nonsense ensuing there. Ultimately the parents' have had their revenge on their killer from beyond the grave and would surely be content to keep the house intact and the kids there. F** 'em, let them get on with it with their weirdo kids. To sum up: it plods aimlessly, with no natural conclusion in sight. The effects are hit and miss. The acting is decent enough on the part of the adults but the kids are utterly useless and the sobbing, dubbed voices steal at least half of the plot's sense. Avoid!

rundbauchdodo A couple is killed in an extremely sadistic way, but their souls return to their two orphaned children to caress them, to take revenge on the killer and to mock the relatives who want to sell the house and the one who wants to buy it respectively. Sounds odd for a Fulci movie, doesn't it?And it really is kind of odd. It starts like a typical Fulci-gorefest with the murder scene which has to be seen to be believed, especially when one considers this one was made for TV. But after this unbelievably violent prologue, the whole thing turns into a fairy tale. There are even scenes that could come right out of a typical Italian slapstick comedy! So, "La Dolce Casa degli Orrori" is an extremely strange mix of genres, and most of the special effects are very cheesy, although the murder scene is outrageously disgusting.It's not bad, but by far inferior to Fulci's other film in the four part TV-series Houses of Doom, "La Casa nel Tempo", which is terrific (the other two are by Umberto Lenzi and called "La Casa delle Anime Erranti" and "La Casa dei Sortilegi").