“The Sweet House of Horrors” on Blu-ray by Cauldron Films!

A house robbery gone wrong results in the brutal murder of twin siblings’, Marco and Sarah’s, parents Roberto and Mary Valdi when they stumble upon the masked thief, catching him in the act in their beautiful villa home.  The twins bawling at the funeral gives way to impish innocence as the children cope in jokes amongst each other and to their now legal guardians, Uncle Carlo and Aunt Marcia.  Looking to sell the now sullied house, Carlo and Marcia invite a pompous realtor to examine and price the home only to have strange occurrences begin a series of unexplained phenomena the children are certain to be their parent’s lingering and love presence to keep the house within the family.  The parental entities also seek revenge on their attacker whose has been close to the family for years.  As the spirits continue their course of playful and perturbed poltergeist toward their children and unwanted visitors, an unaware Carlo and Marcia hire an exorcist to rid the house of what they suspect to be an evil spirit. 

The third made-for-TV film in the Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina doomed The Houses of Doom series, in which none of the films aired due to their too gruesome violence, “The Sweet House of Horrors” is the second Lucio Fulci production under the defunct 1989 series, coinciding with “The House of Clocks.”  Just like that film, Fulci also invented the concept of murdered parents being guardian angels over their children while thwarting murderers, realtors, and exorcists from taking what they hold most precious, their children and their home.  The shooting script comes from “Devil Fish” and “Phantom of Death” duo Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini.  The fantasy-ghost house horror is another production of Reteitalia and Dania Film and filmed in peaceful Italian municipal of Ponte Pattoli.

“The Sweet House of Horrors” has an alternating appointed cast of main characters that turns focus between the children, Marco (Giuliano Gensini, “The Fishmen and Their Queen”) and Sarah (Ilary Blasi), the inheriting guardians of Carlo (Jean-Christophe Brétignière, “Rats:  Night of Terror”) and Marcia (Cinzia Monreale, “The Beyond”), and the dead parents turned ambivalent malicious poltergeists with Mary (Lubka Lenzi, “Massacre”) and Roberto (Pascal Persiano “Demons 2”) Valdi.  Giuliano Gensini and Ilary Blasi are well matched bratty children with mischievous dispositions who let their parents setoff hurricane force winds in the house and unleash topsy-turvy fog to combat the selling of the house and the unwanted removal of the children by the new guardians.   The children are also the only ones who know what’s actually going on while Carlo and Marcia chalk it up to either Marcia overactive imagination or, eventually, boiling the explanation down to malevolent ghosts unaware that it’s actually the deceased Mary and Roberto being impish apparitions.  This allows to comical characters to enter the fold in an overweight and pompous realtor lovingly nicknamed Sausage (Franco Diogene, “A Policewoman on a Porno Squad”) and gravely natured exorcist (Vernon Dobtcheff, “Horsehead”) to give levity and breeziness for a television market to a point where it feels almost a like a kids movie, but then we get to Guido (Lino Salemme, “Demons”) whose a guilt-ridden soul is splashed with past transgressions and the blood of his victims that haunt him from beyond the grave, literally, and in these flashes of Lucio Fulci’s ferocity for a visceral showing of range that definitely turns what could very well be a family friendly film into a smaller scale fright and violent feature.  Dante Fioretti (“The Wild Team”) rounds out the cast as the graveside servicing Father O’Toole who is the butt of the joke from not only the children but also the audience as a priest overbooked in his ceremonial duties. 

Finally – we’ve always suspected in The Houses of Doom installments a good old fashion haunting would make an inevitable appearance, but this particular Godfather of Gore entry is no ordinary ghost house narrative.  As read above, “The Sweet House of Horrors” has plenty of light-hearted comedy and fantastical elements to make a great televised production with dancing and floating candle flames, slapstick punching bags with the Sausage character, and two children who laugh and belittle at those in the path of the spirit-induced misfortune, spirits who are just loving parents taken too soon from their children and want to protect them at all cost.  As these scenes playout, feeling breezy, light, and full of supernatural fantasy, one hardcore horror fan could potentially forget their tuned into a Lucio Fulci film if it wasn’t for the opening double murder of the parents, the subsequent revenge killing of the murderer, and the shocking last frames of a hand melting away to the bone.  Granulized bits of body injury and stark severity and gruesomeness slingshot audiences out of the kiddie dreamland into the grisly nightmare of Fulci’s eye for details.  Hair and blood matted together, run over and eviscerated by a large truck, and, of course, “The Sweet House of Horrors” wouldn’t be a Fulci film without a gruesome dislodged eyeball from the socket.  There’s nothing quite like this House of Doom picture, or even in the generalization of haunted house tropes, as “The Sweet House of Horrors” splinters a fractured tale of holding onto dear life a happy nuclear family with the external forces that try to violently rip them apart.  

Cauldron Films proudly presents an uncut and restored Blu-ray release, scanned in 2K from the film negative and encoded onto AVC BD50 with 1080p, high-definition resolution.  The 1989 Fulci film now looks remarkably crisp in its European widescreen 1.66:1 aspect ratio.  A counterargument against the defined image could be the color timing that does have a bit of a wash layer overtop, reducing hues down to a pause in the image pop.  The reserved grading primarily hits the internal scenes, perhaps a result of the transparent animation layer for dancing candle flames, the ethereally delineated parents, or the blue orb/blob that circles the kids, but there are live shot instances that too are stifled to radiate better.  Textures are definitely not washed away as we receive an in-depth look at the wardrobe design that distinctly set characters apart, such as Sausage’s prim-and-proper suit, Guido’s paint-speckled denim overalls, and the Exorcist’s dark cloak getup, courtesy competent compression.  The ADR English and Italian 2.0 mono tracks offer a more than adequate A-to-Z dialogue with instances of crackling, more so the beginning.  The hit tracks and other targeted ambient sounds land with depth and range incorporated into the action with the character.  As with a mono track, distinction can be lost but with many Cauldron releases, there’s a pseudo-tier balancing of separating sounds through the 2.0 channels.  English subtitles are available on both releases and are well transcribed with excellent pacing.  Special features includes new Cauldron Films’ produced content, such as interviews with actress Cinzia Monreale Sweet Muse of Horrors in Italian with Englis subtitles, production designer Massimo Antonello Fulci House of Horrors in Italian with English subtitles, editor Alberto Moriani Editing for the Masters in Italian with English subtitles, and an audio commentary track with film historian regulars Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth.  The release also includes archival interviews previously seen on Mediablasters DVD release with interviews from actors Cinzia Monreale, Jean-Christophe Brétigniere, Pascal Persiano, Lino Salemme, and screenplay writer Gigliola Battaglini, all of which are either in Italian or English with English subtitles on the Italian interviews.  Matthew Therrien and Eric Lee provide, yet again, another compositional illustration of the more harrowing sides of “The Sweet House of Horrors” and its logo design inside a clear Scanova Blu-ray case.  The reverse cover also pulls a fiery still from the story.  There are no additional supplements inside or out with a cropped pressed image of the front cover on the disc that has a runtime 83-minutes and has region free playback.

Last Rites: “The Sweet House of Horrors” is a paradoxical made-for-TV special that never saw the light of public broadcast day but lands safely in the distributive hands of Cauldron Films with a new Blu-ray, Hi-Def release too good to pass up.

“The Sweet House of Horrors” on Blu-ray by Cauldron Films!