House of Clocks (Beyond Terror) [DVD] [1989]

A. Griffiths

at 8:40 am

Review by A. Griffiths for House of Clocks (Beyond Terror) [DVD] [1989]
Rating: (1 / 5)
If you’re still interested in watching any late 1980’s movies by gore master Lucio Fulci, chances are you might want to add this to your list. Well, don’t. It’s another total turkey. As far as I can see, Fulci started a downward slide with “Manhattan Baby”, and never recovered. I have seen “Aenigma” (a joke) “Touch of Death” (pitiful), “A Cat in the Brain” (nonsensical), “Voices From Beyond (snoozefest), and even sat through “The Ghosts of Sodom” (run as far as you can from this abomination), so I have no-one else to blame but myself for even giving “House of Clocks” a try.

The plot is roughly this: An elderly couple inhabit a large mansion, and they are more than a little eccentric, by which I mean that from the very outset they are both seen to have homicidal tendencies! Into this situation drop three young petty criminals who have designs on stealing some loot from the treasure laden house. The twist is that the treasures of the house are all clocks, and when the violent youths meet the crazy old couple, the clocks themselves play a big part in what happens next…

Ok so what’s wrong with this movie? Well basically, most of it. As with all of Fulci’s later works it’s hampered by everything that could possibly make a passable horror movie into a disaster. The acting is really poor. I’ve never seen such amateurish mugging and wailing as we get here from the three central youngsters. They are just terrible. A really, REALLY bad dubbing job only makes things worse, and English speaking dubbing team don’t seem to have a clue about matching dialogue up to lip movements, there is barely a moment when the cast look like they are using their own voices. The elderly couple are just as bad, even though they don’t ham it up, they are lumbered with an equally hopeless dub job.

Sadly, the list of shame goes on. The direction and camera work are totally uninspired. Fulci has a few trademark images that he continues to roll out over and over again. Cameras mount staircases, zoom in on shadows or doorknobs, jump rapidly in focus from foreground to background and back again, etc etc. I’ve seen all these tricks a hundred times and the novelty has long since worn off. Worse still, the effects are now beyond lame. All the gore scenes (brief and not very explicit) are really poor, the effects are very shoddy and they just don’t work. The non-gore special effects are equally terrible, and sadly this film relies on a few trick shots for important scenes, all of which are botched. It’s like Fulci doesn’t know how to make anything pass for realistic, or just doesn’t care.

But the very worst offender of all is the plot. Oh my god. Words fail me in trying to explain what’s going on here. The film has a major supernatural twist and from the moment that everything in the house goes pear shaped (you’ll know when), the film just unravels totally. Nothing works, nothing makes sense, nothing gets explained. Don’t think I am just not getting it. I love surreal cinema and being made to think. But this is an insult. As stupid event followed stupid event I was almost laughing, but by the time the end credits rolled, I was wondering how this was ever passed off as serious entertainment, it’s such a mess it’s just not funny.

Take my advice and don’t go near this. I’m sorry to be so negative about Lucio Fulci when he has produced some of the genre’s finest shockers, but his later films never repeated the success of the golden days, and this is just another example of him churning out pot-boilers when he had long since lost the ability or interest in making a good product.