Blood gushes from a statuette as a Tibetan monk hacks at it with a hatchet; a skeleton rolls along in a wheelchair; tarantulas crawl over dead bodies; a small child has blood on his hands: these nightmarish visions are a regular occurrence for poor geology student Carla (Stefania Orsola Garello). Her boyfriend Kevin tries to put her mind at rest: "The doctors gave you a reasonable explanation", he reminds her, "They said that you have psychic powers. You're a medium."
It's craptastic dialogue like this, along with inept gore, that will make The House of Lost Souls a painful watch or a bearable one, depending on your particular proclivities. Personally speaking, the dreadful writing and bad special effects make this a reasonably enjoyable time waster -- not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but bonkers enough to entertain for the duration.
Directed by Umberto Lenzi, The House of Lost Souls was the fourth and last film in The Houses of Doom collection of made-for-TV movies, (the others being The House of Clocks and The Sweet House of Horror, both directed by Lucio Fulci, and The House of Witchcraft, also by Lenzi). It sees a group of young people taking refuge at an old motel where they encounter the malevolent spirits of several murder victims that seek revenge on the living.
What follows is a random series of supernatural events, fairly typical of the Ghosthouse series (this film is also known as Ghosthouse 3), in which the living are tormented by the dead, before they are decapitated one by one. It's all extremely silly stuff, with the craziest death being that of the youngest of the group, Gianluca (Costantino Meloni), who loses his head to a vicious washing machine. Other victims are separated from their noggins by chainsaw, axe and a dumb waiter! The House of The Lost Souls also features one of my favourite lines of dialogue in Italian horror: on learning that the doors and windows of the motel have been sealed shut, one of the characters exclaims, "Reinforced concrete! Must be 27 metres thick!". How does he know?
In the film's suitably daft finale, Kevin uses a metal detector to locate the heads of the murder victims so that he can lay their spirits to rest. I didn't know metal detectors had a 'severed head' setting.
5/10. It's garbage, but entertainingly so.
