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Houses of Doom: The House of Lost Souls
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Cauldron Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (24th May 2025). |
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The Film
 A team of geologists from the University of Rome are returning from an expedition in the Swiss Engadin when their journey is cut short by a landslide that cuts off the only road out. Rather than turning back to the village several miles back, they see a hotel sign for the "Hermit's Hotel" and take a detour and beg the hotel's mute proprietor (dubbing artist Charles Borromel, Absurd) reluctantly lets them in and they discover after some snooping around that the hotel seems to have been shut up for more than the season. Carla (The Story of Boys & Girls' Stefania Orsola Garello), who has exhibited telepathic powers since childhood, starts experiencing visions of past violence in the hotel, seeing an old man murdering guests with an axe. Mary (Specters' Laurentina Guidotti) gets stuck in the kitchen freezer and swears she saw corpses hanging from the meat hooks. Carla's younger brother Gianluca (Costantino Meloni) claims he has seen blood dripping from the ceiling. Mary's boyfriend Guido (Gianluigi Fogacci) dismisses the disturbances as hallucinations but Carla's American boyfriend Kevin (Hollywood Hot Tubs' Joseph Alan Johnson) and brother Massimo (Body Puzzle's Matteo Gazzolo) encounter local television reporter Daria (Licia Colò) in the village and learn that the "Hotel of Horrors" has been uninhabited for twenty years since the owner and his grown children murdered several clients for their valuables, going to their deaths without revealing the exact number of victims or the location of their severed heads. Kevin and Massimo race back to the hotel, but its lost souls are already setting about claiming new victims among the living. One of four productions commissioned by Reteitalia from Luciano Martino's Dania Film as "Houses of Doom", all four productions – two from Lucio Fulci in House of Clocks and Sweet House of Horrors and two from Umberto Lenzi with House of Witchcraft and this film House of Lost Souls – proved too violent for television and instead they went to the video market in Italy and other territories. House of Lost Souls is pretty much a dumber but funner retread of Lenzi's Ghosthouse produced for Joe D'Amato's Filmirage the previous year with common elements like a spectral child and stop-start-camera materializations and dematerializations of ghosts with the additional novelty of multiple beheadings and a score by Goblin's Claudio Simonetti (credited as "Claude King") consisting of an original title theme and otherwise recycled cues from Demons, Dial: Help, Opera, and Body Count. The Lenzi-penned screenplay is awash in absurdities with lines like "The doctors gave you a perfectly reasonable explanation: you have psychic powers," and the dialogue heavy in the most idiotic "logical explanations" for various phenomena, but that is to be expected and even savored in a Lenzi horror film. In both the Italian and English dubs, the child actor is pretty obnoxious (but it appears that Lenzi took a cue from Fulci's The Murder Secret). Japanese actor Hal Yamanouchi, who went to Italy to study at the University of Perugia and started appearing films in the late seventies onwards like 2019: After the Fall of New York and Phantom of Death and is still acting today, appears as one of the ghosts along with Beni Cardoso (Barbed Wire Dolls). The climax is pretty much the same with the addition of some more severed heads but in some ways it actually feels like a horror-themed TV movie that could have been made in the U.S. minus the gore and even the implication of bodily dismemberment. American actor Johnson (who died in 2023) had previously appeared in the American slashers The Slumber Party Massacre and Berserker and would also appear in Fulci's Sodoma's Ghost before returning to America where he would also appear in the slasher Iced. 
Video
While the Fulci films were picked up for DVD release by Shriek Show, the Lenzi films were not among the group of the director's titles that they (or any other American boutique label) licensed for release, so the best bet to see House of Lost Souls outside of the gray market Japanese- and Greek-subtitled versions was Vipco's British DVD featuring a good-for-the-time non-anamorphic letterboxed transfer which was more cheaply-found due to the large pressing run than German's hardcase DVD edition under the "Ghosthouse 3" title. Cauldron Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray – previously released last year in a six disc (four Blu-ray/two soundtrack CD) "House of Doom" limited edition box set exclusively available from Cauldron Films and DiabolikDVD and now sold out – comes from a 4K scan of the original 16mm camera negatives and obviously blows what was previously available out of the water. Cinematographer Ferrando largely eschews scrims for the exteriors but the few opticals and and overall cheap processing resulted in a gritty appearance that looked noisy on the aged standard definition transfer. Detail is so crisp here that the various cost-effective touches are much more apparent like the torrential rain storm that only falls in the foreground of a wide establishing shot of the hotel as well as how much work the foreground cobwebs do to suggest how derelict the location really is. 
Audio
English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks are included – both post-dubbed – with optional English SDH and English subtitles. Both tracks are roughly the same quality, with the English dub being preferable to some of us due to the familiarity of the English dubbing voices while the Italian track may sound less silly to non-native speakers (and possibly just as absurd as the English track to Italian speakers). Foley effects are typically exaggerated and the recycled Simonetti tracks do a lot of the heavy-lifting in terms of mood.
Extras
The funner of the two Lenzi films gets a pair of commentary tracks. First up is an audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan who affectionately discusses Lenzi's long career in several genres, including his pre-Dario Argento jet set gialli and crime films, as well as how the cynicism about authority the infuses those works can even be seen in his two "Houses of Doom" films. Deighan also discusses the influences of shifts in the horror genre in Italy and internationally shaped the film, citing the influences of both The Shining and The Amityville Horror along with Lamberto Bava's concurrent television horror work for Dania and Reteitalia, the Joe D'Amato's Filmirage horror productions aping American genre product, particularly the "La Casa" films starting with Ghosthouse which were marketed as sequels to the first two Evil Dead films which were retitled in Italy simply as "The House" (necessitating the retitling of New World's House films for Italian release), along with the film's realization of its spectral killers including the eighties-specific uses of technology and household objects like washing machines come to life. Next up is an audio commentary by film historians Rod Barnett and Adrian Smith who provide the background context of the series' production for Reteitalia, the untested television standards for private cable networks, the shelving of the series – noting that it actually did air years later but not as separate films rather than a series – as well as some interesting production factoids like Smith revealing the titular "House of Lost Souls" being one of several Brutalist-style fascist summer camp buildings dotting the countryside, erected to get children out of the city where tuberculosis ran rampant and promote healthy living (and Barnett suggesting that actually setting it in a former fascist camp might have been a more interesting idea). They also discuss the possible Hollywood film influences, the cast including Johnson who was unfortunately not asked about his Italian work in his interview on the Blu-ray of and Borromel who apparently one day just got tired of the business and disappeared.  Working with Umberto" (18:47) is an interview with effects artist Elio Terribili whose comments on working with Lenzi and Fulci were rather broad on his interview on the House of Witchcraft disc but here features some more specific anecdotes in the context of his usual working methods and liking to be prepared whereas Lenzi was frustratingly vague about what he wanted, sending Terribili into a rage when he finally voiced how he wanted the washing machine death to be executed on the set and belittling him for suggesting ways to make it workable. Terribili credits Ferrando with making the peace and teaching him a lot, as well as being surprised when Lenzi actually apologized to him in front of the crew. "The House of Rock" (14:21) is an interview with composer Simonetti who discusses his introduction to film scoring as part of Goblin on Argento's Deep Red and subsequent scoring work with Goblin coming together and breaking up again, and becoming both a solo artist as a film composer and in disco (revealing that collaborating again as Goblin on Argento's Sleepless was a stressful experience after getting used to working alone). He reveals that he usually had carte-blanche in his scoring assignments in various genres and was never asked to emulate Goblin and that he had not consulted with Lenzi for the "Houses of Doom" films (usually working with producers and editors apart from films on which the director stayed on the production and supervised the editing). "The Kriminal Cinema of Umberto Lenzi" (52:13) is a 2001 documentary featuring a career-length interview with Lenzi illustrated by clips from his films – demonstrating just how far we have come from VHS and bootleg sources to standard definition DVD and high definition Blu-ray remasters of his films – with an emphasis on his schooling, his influences, his particular liking for the war films he made in the sixties (he would return to the genre in the eighties but on a more impoverished budget), his mutually-beneficial collaboration with Carroll Baker on their giallo films, his crime films and working with the talents and egos of Tomas Milian and Maurizio Merli (including shooting both separately with body doubles for the other for the climax of The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist) and less favorably of his later films. 
Overall
The dumber and funner of Umberto Lenzi's two "Houses of Doom" films House of Lost Souls comes to Blu-ray lopping heads with gusto.
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