Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Third best Fulci film?, March 16, 2003
For starters I genuinely enjoy Fulci's films and am a fan of senseless gore movies, so if your an average horror fan you should maybe deduct one star of my rating.Anyhow, I've seen most of Fulci's film's, The Beyond being my favourite and the Anchorbay DVD of Beyond rocks, but House by the cemetary was one that I had not seen. I decided to buy the film as it was offten ranked as his third greatest (#1 Beyond, #2 Zombi but I like City of the Living Dead a little better than House as third) and also as it starred the super cute Fulci regular Catriona (Katherine) MacColl. I got the Diamond DVD as it was afordable and another guy in his review here said that he had being informed that although the Daimond version was rated 'R', it was actually the uncut version. And although a VERY graphic throat slashing scene remained intact and the rest of the film seemed uncut, I later read somewhere that a version 3 minutes longer was soon to be released. Whether or not the Diamond DVD here is the uncut version I cannot say. House by the Cemetary basicly centres on a family moving into a house inhabited by a evil doctor who uses his victims fresh body parts to stay alive. It is filmed in typical Fulci style that critics consider full of continuety errors, while fans feel that this makes the films dream/nightmare like. I am fairly in between, I always believed that Fulcis camera technique is certainly artistic but he obviously can't tell a straight story and while this works brilliantly in the Beyond, it just makes some of his work very boring to sit through like Zombi. House had a genuinely eerie ambiance and Fulci does create a creepy atmosphere successfully but not to the extent of his master piece the Beyond. Being Fulci, there is some great gore in this film. Theres a great throat slashing scene (mentioned above) which is an excellent effect and a knife in the back of the head scene, but there is also a very weak bat attack scene, the bat ten times more phoney than the fake spiders in the Beyond. There was not as much of Fulci's trademark gore in House as some of his other flicks, but once again the Diamond version is 84 minutes and I read somewhere that the uncut running time is 87 minutes, but this is the only version I've seen so I cannont coment. If your a fulci fan then you will really enjoy this film but if you are new to his work then maybe check out the Beyond first or rent House before you buy.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The ZOOOOMMMM by The Cemetery, April 19, 2005
When i first saw this film on video way back in the early 8os, i thought it was a pile of smudgy ,worm infested pile of crap.It lured me in with it's lurid poster on the video shops shelf among all the great tacky films we love today.So whats changed? Firstly, the video version was full screen and worn and cut. Now that it is on dvd we can all see it in widescream digitallllly mastered and uncut. It is like watching another film, and i must say, i think it is one of Fulcis best films. Full of poetry, atmosphere and creepy menace. Yes it may be tacky in parts and some scenes tend to rely on over the top gore, but this is what makes this film so unique. It's unpredictable and has an almost homemade feel about it that you just don't get anymore from films. Maybe Jess Franco. but he never made a film like this. A film that could only have come out of Italy at that most cherished of times the 80s, and offering somthing that America could never duplicate with all it's millions, and for that it should be appreciated. Go seek it out.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't go in the basement....!!!!, May 14, 2005
I have long been a Fulci fanatic and this film, "House By The Cemetery," delivers the goods in spades.
The story is simple, if not altogether derivative. A young family moves from their cramped New York apartment into a spacious New England mansion. What sets this place apart from their previous abode, however, is the presence of the home's original owner, the detestable Dr. Freudstein. It would seem that he has been hiding in the home's shuttered basement for the last 100 years, picking off stray dwellers of the house and using their fluids and various other organs to sustain his own decomposing body. Sound far-fetched? Well, it should. But don't let that deter you. This is not "Rebecca From Sunnybrook Farm" or "Meet John Doe" we're talking about. It's a horror film with all the trademark gore and over-the-top violence we've come to expect from Lucio Fulci. Not high art by any stretch, but certainly never boring either. Definitely worth a purchase, especially if, like me, you happen to be a fan of this stuff.
The Anchor Bay DVD is absolutely first-rate with a pristine transfer and some cool theatrical/T.V. trailers.
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