Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Plot synopsis:
A young woman (Daniela Doria) in an old abandoned house is looking for her boyfriend Steven who has taken her there for sex. The young woman discovers her boyfriend's horribly mutilated dead body when she gets stabbed through the back of her head with a sharp kitchen knife by an unseen person. The killer drags the woman's body through a door leading to the cellar.New York City, several months later. A young boy named Bob (Giovanni Frezzi), and his parents Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) are preparing to move to a new house in New England just outside Boston previous occupied by Normans ex-colleague, Dr. Peterson, who recently murdered his mistress before committing suicide. The Boyles are to spend six months at the house, whilst Norman finishes his research project of old houses at the request of his employer Professor Muller (director Lucio Fulci). As his mother packs, Bob looks at the photograph of a sinister-looking old house, hanging on the Boyles wall. In it, he sees a young girl warning him to stay away.In New Whitby, Boston, Bob waits in his parents car while they pick up their house keys at the estate office. He makes further contact with the girl in the photo, who this time appears across the street. Despite the distance between them, Bob and the girl (Silvia Collatina), who introduces herself as Mae, can hear each other without opening the car windows. Mae again warns Bob to stay away. In the real estate office, the friendly Mrs. Gittelson (Dagmar Lassander) is annoyed with her laconic colleague Harold, who hands the couple "the Freudstein keyes." "It's Oak Mansion, Harold," she insists. She seems to recognize Dr. Boyle and asks him if hes been to New Whitby before. Norman says that he hasn't. Accompanying the family to Oak Mansion, Mrs. Gittelson promises to arrange for a babysitter to drop by. Lucy is struck the by the resemblance between the house in the photograph and their new home. But Norman seems strangely disinterested.Inside, the old house is spacious, but in a poor state of repair. They notice in the kitchen that the cellar door is locked and nailed shut. As they start unpacking, a strange young woman arrives and introduces herself as Anne the babysitter (Ania Pieroni). That night, Norman hears noises and on rising to investigate, finds Anne unblocking the cellar door. The next day, Norman goes to the local library to look over Dr. Petersons materials. Mr. Wheatley the librarian (Carlo De Mejo) also seems to recognize him and asks if he's been to the town before. Norman again replies that he has not. The assistant librarian Daniel Douglas (Giampaolo Saccarola) informs Norman that Dr. Peterson has conducted private research at the old house. Hed been studying records of disappearances in the area over the last several years as well as medical reports and death certificates, none of which has any relevance to his official studies.In the wild undergrowth around the house, Mae shows Bob a tombstone bearing the name of Mary Freudstein and says that the woman is not really dead. Indoors, Lucy finds a tombstone set into the floor. It bears the name Jacob Tess Freudstein. Scared and confused by her discovery, she hears noises emanating from all over the house and breaks down screaming. When Norman returns home, he reassures his distraught wife that its quite normal for some old houses in the region to have indoor tombs, because of the hard wintery ground. Producing a set of keys and a flashlight, Norman opens the cellar door and proceeds to walk down the stairs only be attacked by a large bat, which sinks its teeth into his hand and proves incredibly hard to get off. Norman stabs at its loasome pulpy body over and over in which the things oozes globs of blood before dropping dead to the kitchen floor. Now completely spooked, the family drives down to the estate officce where they demand to be rehoused. Their demands are met with exaggerated yawns from Harold. They are told they will have to wait just a few more days before they can move somewhere else. "That Freudstein place" he intones as they leave.The next day while the Boyles are at the hospital to look over Norman's injury caused by the bat, Mrs. Gittelson arrives at the house to tell the family that a property has been found for them. When no one answers her knock, she lets herself in. When she casually stands on the Freudstein tombstone, it cracks apart, grinding her ankle. As she struggles to free herself, an apparently cadaverous figure (unseen except for a normal left arm and a rotting right forearm) emerges from the cellar and attacks her with a fireplace poker, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck. Mrs. Gittelson bleeds to death when blood jets from her multiple wounds and she's dragged to the cellar.The next morning, Lucy finds Anne scrubbing up a huge bloodstain on the kitchen floor leading to the closed cellar door. When asked what she is doing, Anne is noncommittal and eludes Lucy's attempts to talk. At a local coffee shop in town, Norman tells Lucy that he's discovered that the mysterious Dr. Freudstein was a turn-of-the-century surgeon with a penchant for illegal experiments. Norman tells Lucy that he will be traveling back to New York for more research on Dr. Freudstein, telling Lucy that he will be away until well after nightfall. On the way, Norman drops by the library and finds a cassette recording of Dr. Peterson, whos deranged ramblings explain the horrific circumstantial which drove him to suicide. He was not the killer of his mistress and children, but the ghoulish Dr. Fredustein was.Back at the house, Anne goes down into the cellar looking for Bob, when she is attacked and decapitated by the still-unseen Dr. Freudstein. Bob goes down to investigate, when he sees Anne's severed head come rolling down the metal stairs and runs back screaming, just in time to avoid being shut in with the monstrous denizen. Lucy at first refuses to believe the frantic Bob's wild tale about Anne being killed. However, Lucy cannot find any trace of Anne anywhere in the house. That evening, after his mother has gone to bed, Bob returns to the cellar with a flashlight to look for Anne. The door behind him slams shut, and glowing eyes peer at him from the darkness.Lucy is woken up by Bob's frenzied shrieks for help, and she tries to open the cellar door. The key snaps. Lucy tries using a knife as jimmy, but it too snaps. As Lucy panics, Norman arrives back and attacks the cellar door with an axe. On the other side, the rotting hands of Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava) appear and hold Bob's head to the wooden panels. Normans axe blows come dangerously close to Bob's head, missing his son by a fraction of an inch. One blow chops off the monster's left hand, and he staggers away in pain from the door, dragging the unconscious Bob with him.At last, the cellar reveals its secrets opening up in full view to reveal a charnel house of mutilated bodies, its shadowy recesses dotted with surgical equipment and a gore-streaked pathology slab. The horribly deformed Dr. Freudstein is shown as a rotting living corpse with shrunken in eyes, and rotting flesh. As the couple ventures into the cellar to rescue their son, Norman breathlessly fills Lucy in on the details of his find. The 150-year-old Freudstein has apparently discovered a way of keeping himself alive by using the hacked up body parts of his victims to regenerate his blood cells. Norman attempts to attack Freudstein, but the revolting-looking ghoul twists the axe from Norman's grip. Norman then grabs a knife off the surgical tray and rams it into Freudstein's gut releasing a sickening stew of maggots and corrupted blood. Although wounded, the monstrous Freudstein continues to attack. Lucy and Bob watch in horror as Freudstein picks up Norman and literally ripps his throat out with his one rotting hand. Lucy and Bob spot a metal ladder in the corner of the basement which leads up to the cracked tombstone in the living room floor. With the ghastly monster standing between them and the cellar door, their only hope is to climb up the metal ladder and try to push apart the two stone segments to escape. Lucy strains desperately to shift the stone, but her ankle is grabbed by the perusing Dr. Freudstein. As Bob clings to the topmost rung, he sees his mother pulled down, her head battered by each metal step down. Freudstein finishes off Lucy by ramming her head into the concrete cellar floor, splattering it like a melon. As Freudstein advances up the metal latter to the helpless Bob, the little boy strains to escape by forcing his head through the jagged aperture. At the last minute, as Freudstein clutches the boy's ankle, Bob is yanked up and out of reach by unseen hands to find Mae standing before him. But with Mae is the 19th Century figure of her mother, Mary Freudstein (Teresa Rossi Passante), who gently urges them to leave for other people will no doubt drop in for her husband's continuing research for eternal life. Mrs. Freudstein leads Mae and Bob away from the house and down the wintery grove into a netherworld of ghosts and sadness.Quote from Henry James: "No one will ever know whether children are monsters, or monsters are children."

Tags: cruelty, grindhouse film, murder, cult, violence, horror, flashback, insanity, sadist

Review:
"The House by the Cemetery", is a sinister horror movie by Lucio Fulci.
I think we ought to accept by now that several Italian horror movies, let alone the ones directed by Mr. Fulci, are not exactly to be praised because of their plot and exceedingly appropriate logic.
The high point in "The House by the Cemetery", along with many other films directed by Lucio Fulci, is without doubt the atmosphere and pleasant demonstration of fear-provoking imagery.In "The House by the Cemetery", Dr. Boyle moves to the countryside in New England with his wife, Lucy and his obnoxious little son, Bobby.
The sequence in which we see the family trying to fight against this outlandish creature, taken from Mr. Fulci's worst nightmares, is by far one of the most shocking and professionally made scenes I have witnessed in a horror movie.
I think "The House by the Cemetery" is one of those films that only pleases horror fans who can appreciate Mr. Fulci's movies for what they are, instead of focusing on the ambiguity and the lack of logic.
Like all Fulci's films there are some problems including some bad acting, annoying dubbed voices, multiple plot holes and things that come up but are never hinted at or talked about again but overall the film conveys a frightening atmosphere (which Fulci is great at), excellent FX and gore effects (with one possible exception, lets just say it involves a bat), a great musical score and one of my favorite and most horrific villains ever put on screen.
Deemed by many fans as being one of Fulci's most 'goriest', I prepared myself for countless scenes of bloodshed and gore and instead got nothing more than the usual pap featured in the countless horror films of the 1980's and a few dust bunnies that were blowing across the floor.Fulci, the king of gore, has proven in the past with such films as "ZOMBIE", "THE BEYOND" and "CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD", that a movie with a terribly thin plot and terrible actors can still entertain with high levels of unnecessary and perhaps redundant gore - but "HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY" is an entirely different story altogether.Fulci continues his usual tradition by casting the worst bunch of actors that could be scrounged up at the local playhouse and giving them a ridiculous script/dialogue to be delivered while giving the audience countless camera shots that pan across the eyes of the actors as they try to make sense of the imminent danger that they have been put in.
Thanks to the ludicrous 'voice overs' provided by a woman who also dubs the voice for a little girl, she makes Bob look and sound incredibly stupid every time he opens his mouth to say something.Nothing is quite believable by the time the troupe move into the 'Freudstein House', as known by the realtor and her assistant, 'Oak House' to Norm and Lucy.
Other than that, no scenes of further violence take place until at least an hour into the movie if you don't count the scene involving a decapitated mannequin as witnessed first-hand by Bob and later through an un-related flashback by Nancy (!!!).Some above-par gore scenes contained in "HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY" would include a man getting his throat torn out and a woman meeting her demise with a screw-driver type implement after she gets her foot stuck in a crack in the floor!
Other than that, there is very little body count contained in the film and one death scene is just plain confusing which involves a woman getting dragged down a set of stairs by her feet, hitting every step on the way down with her head!Only one scene stood out for me in this movie and that was when the realtor backs out of the driveway after leading the family to their new home, accidently knocking over a tombstone to which she yells, "DAMN TOMBSTONE!" before speeding off in a cloud of dust.
Lucio Fulci had been working steadily in Italian cinema since the late fifties, and he achieved critical acclaim for genre efforts like Four Gunmen of the Apocalypse and The Psychic, but he still hadn't found his own personnel film-making forte.
With such a great crew at his disposal and a genuinely creepy location to create some gore drenched set pieces, House by the Cemetery looked set to be the greatest slasher movie ever filmedIt opens inside a spacious dilapidated house that bares a striking resemblance to Amityville.
Anyway, after a few more gory shenanigans, including a psychotic bat and Anne violently loosing her head, the family realize that they're not alone in the mansion, and finally they try to escape Sadly, House by the Cemetery is one of Fulci's least credible creations, which pales remarkably in comparison with his efforts like the giallo Don't Torture a Duckling.
This resulted in the movie looking like it was inadequately written - with a poor sense of continuity, which left one too many gaping plot holes that should have been filled before the film's completion.
I have to say that I really enjoyed this movie (I used to be a real FULCI-fan) and I think it`s a real pitty that today`s horror flicks miss this piece of atmosphere and hard suspense!
Any fan of Maestro Fulci's work, or of the horror genre in general must try to see this film.Film fans who are familiar with Fulci's visual techniques and atmospheric elements will not be disappointed, as that "The House By The Cemetery" has all of the familiar elements (maggots, a zombi, foreboding omens galore), but the real difference here is in the film's perspective.
It drags pretty much the whole way through until about the last 15 minutes or so, and although there are a few cool gore scenes, and the ending is surprisingly "downbeat"- it just doesn't make up for the poor pacing of the rest of the film...The story is about a guy and his wife and kid who move from New York to New England.
I'd recommend this one to hardcore Fulci fans or general Italian horror fans - but only after checking out some of Fulci's superior films such as THE BEYOND, ZOMBIE, THE GATES OF HELL, THE NEW YORK RIPPER and A CAT IN THE BRAIN, to name a few...a pretty generous 6/10 - and that's only because it ended on a high note....
After plundering the Gates of Hell in not one but two consecutive films, Lucio Fulci went back to basics with "House by the Cemetery," a tale that apes "The Shining" only on the most superficial level, and tells a story that--despite some ambiguity and confusing plot points--is relatively linear.
While "Cemetery" shows Fulci's most polished direction since his early-'70s gialli, the story is actually less engaging than the incoherent muddles of "City of the Living Dead" and "The Beyond"--I've praised him for his methods of capturing nightmarish imagery on-screen, but this film is almost TOO conventional.
This was the second film directed by Fulci I watched (first one being Zombie 2), and I must say that I'm completely satisfied with it Movie is low budget (but then I don't really care about budgets), but it looks & works well.
Italian horror mastermind Lucio Fulci in his element: "Quella villa accanto al cimitero" is another creepy flick which contains a mixture between gore and mystery as we have seen it in "The Beyond" before.
There are a number of scenes in The House by the Cemetery that feed off that Halloween opening, and while Italian director Lucio Fulci knows HOW to execute most of what it is that he shoots here, there is little-to-no evidence that he in any way realises WHY it happens to play out in that manner.
Cut to the Boyles, a quaint little American family of three based in New York on the cusp of a holiday; the father, Norman (Malco), a professional in his field of medicine and married to his wife Lucy (MacColl) – their son, the somewhat typically named in that overly cutesy manner that is meant to infer a great deal of innocence, Bobby (Frezza), barely that of ten years old and completing the trio.The Boyles are off to the very same house we observed become a cauldron of flash nudity and brutal murder during the opening – the titular house beside that titular cemetery; the dwelling seemingly offering good value as a holiday home sold to them by a company neglecting to mention a horrible history it carries with it.
The sentiment of the film being obsessed, indeed preoccupied, with the item of blood and gore, or the prospect of some violence rearing up, is encapsulated in a scene resembling your more bog-standard horror movie sequence in which a character walks down some creaking basement steps into an unlit abyss below, something rendered an exercise of bloodshed when a bat happens to swoop down and take a chunk out of the individual.
One thing that jumps out at me when watching movies like this one, Italian Horror films have the best music.
I think "House by the Cemetery" is the scariest Lucio Fulci film.
The gore is awesome.The monster in the film is the inspiration in Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" (Doctor Satan.) And the scene where the father is trying to kill the thing is so bad ass.Maybe I'm biased because I'm a big Fulci fan, but "House by the Cemetery" is one of my favorites.
It's true that this movie has many flaws.The plot has way too many gaps and the ending is hideous.Yet,I love this movie because it is really scary and way scarier than "the beyond".With this and "the beyond" it seems that Fulci had many ideas of a great horror movie and didn't have the money to fully accomplish his visions so both these movies look a bit confusing.But especially "the house..."is way too scary to criticise it.The setting of the movie(The house)is fantastic,the atmosphere is creepy,the acting surprisingly good and the killings...enjoyable.The gore effects are very good(although a bit funny)and the soundtrack amazing.Sometimes I wish Fulci had a bigger movie budget.Even with it's flaws"the house..."is a movie all horror fans MUST watch!!It is scary and THAT's what counts after all!!.
The House By The Cemetery is a rather dull offering from Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci, the man who gave us such bloody treats as The Beyond, City Of The Living Dead and Zombi 2.
Taking a little too long to get going, and a little unsure of exactly what kind of film it wants to be, this 1981 effort delivers in the gore department, but ends up lacking everywhere else.A professor, along with his wife and young son, relocates from New York to a creepy Boston house so that he can continue the studies started by his predecessor, who committed suicide.The son befriends a girl whom nobody else seems to be able to see and strange noises emanate from the cellar (which is locked and nailed shut).
After the cellar door is unlocked by the professor, people start to die in typical gory Fulci fashion, slain by an unseen assailant, who, towards the end of the film, is revealed to be a 150 year old surgeon who regenerates himself using other people's body parts.The trademark Fulci gore is effective and is worth waiting for, and there are one or two nice edge-of-the-seat scenes but, suffering from an annoying performance from a 'cute' blonde brat (who makes Angelina Jolie look thin-lipped), a slow first 45 minutes and an ending that makes no sense whatsoever, The House By The Cemetery is certainly not one of the director's best efforts..
Freudstein was apparently a scientist of some sort that has been able to keep himself alive for over 100 years and lives in the basement of the house, killing anyone who enters.This movie is very much a Fulci film as the atmosphere is always bizarre, a few very strange yet unexplained characters and of course, a few horrible death scenes.
Filmed in New England (interiors were shot in Italy) and for the first time, Fulci didn't have to borrow too heavily from his contemporaries.The film is about a couple and young child that move into a creepy house that just happens to be next to a cemetery.
Equipped with a good acting, a great plot, gore, and everything else to be expected from a Fulci flick, this one is definately a horror film classic.Fulci Lives!.
The villain is very gross looking which is always a good thing in a horror movie, the acting is a little corny but I know Fulci was never a 'big budget' type of director so he just worked with what he had.
This bizarre house is not what it seems to be, while the lives of the family are also in mortal danger.Directed by the late Lucio Fulci (The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, Zombie) made an interesting but lifeless and confusing horror film with an supernatural theme.
Fans of director Lucio Fulci, the man behind such gore classics as "Zombie" and "Gates of Hell", might be a bit disappointed with this muddled combination of "The Shining", "The Fly", and "Poltergeist".While it's got most of the elements of his better films, this movie sees rather stitched together, a fact made even more telling by the fact that the American version lurking around on most video store shelves has scenes OUT OF ORDER!As far as I could tell, this is about a doctor of some sort who moves his family out to an old mansion to investigate the scientific work that the house's previous owner left behind.
The acting is not great in this movie, but Italian horror films aren't known for their great exhibitions of acting, so it doesn't matter.The villain of the piece; Dr Freudstein is said to be one of Fulci's most famous zombies, but this is probably more down to the fact that the others are mostly the same as each other, whereas Freudstein is different.
My only criticism of it would be that the monster doesn't get a lot of screentime, which is a shame.Overall, House by the Cemetery is not Fulci's best work, but it's an interesting film with a few redeeming features.
The digs come complete with creaky floorboards, crying/moaning spirits, loud bangs, a rabid devil bat, bleeding walls, a sexy/weird live-in babysitter (Ania Pieroni), the friendly ghost of a little girl and the murderous rotting, eyeless corpse of the house's former owner Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nari); who hides out in the basement and emerges only to hack people up for their blood.Extremely gory Euro-splatter overdone as only Fulci overdoes it: Why slit someone's throat once when you can do it three times?
House By The Cemetery was the fourth and last of a series of Horror films that made Lucio Fulci a major cult figure in America.
A cold, mysterious piece of gothic cinema, House is not to be missed by lovers of Italian Horror or Fulci's films.
A family(Paolo Malco,Giovanni Frezza and Catriona MacColl)moves into an old house near Boston inhabited by a psychotic walking corpse of a doctor named Freudstein(Giovanni De Nava).Whoever strays into the house when Freudstein is on the hunt is brutally butchered.Why?Because doctor Freudstein needs human blood to survive.Great atmosphere,lots of graphic gore and marvelous soundtrack by Walter Rizzati.The ending is very intense and creepy as hell.Almost everyone complains about Giovanni Frezza,but he plays a terrified child very well.The special effects by bloody maestro Gianetto De Rossi and his brother Gino are simply top-notch.The scenes of gory mayhem include a knife through a girl's skull,a babysitter who gets her neck slashed many times then decapitated,the maggots inside of Freudstein's rotting corpse,very nasty flesh ripping etc.There is also a truly nerve-wracking moment when Freudstein pushes a young boy's head up against a door while Paolo Malco("The New York Ripper")attempts to chop it down with an axe.Some people don't appreciate this film and call it trash,but they're not a real horror fans.They love probably a new mainstream crap like "Scream" or "The Mummy".So if you are a part of mainstream society don't rent this one,better watch again "The Mummy" or similar MTV-influenced garbage.However if you like Fulci or extreme gore-you won't be disappointed.Who really cares about holes in the plot?If it's gore you want "Quella villa accanto al cimitero" has plenty of it.What more could a self-respecting Euro-horror fan want?All in all,this is simply a masterpiece.Highly recommended..
Many horror-film characters would have been well advised "Don't look in the basement" (just ask Lila Crane!), but perhaps none more so than the members of the Boyle family, in Lucio Fulci's 1981 gore extravaganza "The House By the Cemetery." In the film, the Boyle parents, along with their cute little blond son, rent a deserted old pile, the Freudstein House, in the fictitious town of New Whitby, Mass.
"The House by the Cemetery" is still one of my best Fulci film like these other notoriously films as "City of the Living Dead" and "The Beyond".
The final scene near the end of the film is truly a bit disgusting where the living dead Dr. Freudstein gets his stomach stabbed by a butcher knife by the professor Norman Boyle.
Once again Lucio Fulci tries his hand at a gore film, and this time makes the fatal mistake of trying to set up some mystery for the viewer, then disregards everything in favour of a gory ending.What's ultimately frustrating about House by the Cemetery is that for most of its running length it manages to be menacing and creepy, but a film that sets up so many questions and answers none will just frustrate those less familiar with the crazy world of Italian horror.Luckily for me I've got enough head injuries to endure such faults, so I just bought into the story.