I have questions.
It’s tempting to just let that be the review, but where’s the fun in that? And that’s what we’re here for, right? Fun.
About that.
I saw House by the Cemetery back when it was released on VHS. Didn’t think much of it. Years later, I would find out that transfer had the reels out of order. Ah. No wonder. Though I assigned re-watching it in its intended order a very low priority, I finally found time, and did.
About that.
I have questions.
So Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Marco) takes on his former mentor’s research. uprooting his child and wife to move to New England, to the very same house the mentor bloodily murdered his mistress and then hanged himself.
To his growing dismay, Boyle finds out the deceased had totally forsaken his original research to instead look into the history of the house’s former owner, a Dr. Freudstein, who was infamous for insane, illegal surgeries, and OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, HE’S IN THE CELLAR WE ALL KNOW HE’S IN THE CELLAR Y’ALL JUST GO TO THE CELLAR ALREADY
Ahem.
That part I can manage. That part I understand. There are three people credited with the screenplay, and even with the reels in the right order, the movie feels like three different scripts were shuffled like playing cards, and then handed to the film crew.
It is a creepy movie. I must give it that. There’s some genuinely unsettling stuff in here, and that’s not necessarily the gore scenes. There is a wonderfully eerie ghost story embedded in House by the Cemetery, but it feels like, as I said, pages from another script
But I have questions. A lot of my questions are perfectly encapsulated in a quote from the movie’s page at Imdb:
What is with the rapidly vanishing blood in this movie? Why is Boyle looking for Freudstein’s tomb miles away when he already knows it’s in his living room? What the hell is up with Ann, anyway?
This movie is the Picnic at Hanging Rock of gore movies.
So no, I didn’t find myself suddenly liking it.
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