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House of Doom: The House Of Witchcraft
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Cauldron Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (24th May 2025). |
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The Film
 Ever since he married old money Martha (Ludwig's Sonia Petrovna), journalist Luke Palmer (Capriccio's Andy J. Forest) has been suffering from a recurring nightmare in which a witch (All the Colors of the Dark's Maria Cumani Quasimodo) tosses his severed head into a boiling cauldron. Elsa (Ring of Death's Susanna Martinková), psychiatrist wife of Luke's late brother, insists that the images are just projections of his repressed feelings about his failing marriage. When Martha comes to pick him up, she spirits him away to the countryside where she has rented a house for him to recuperate from his nervous breakdown and give their relationship another chance. Before they even get there, they are involved in a near-collision with another car that kills its occupants, but Luke is even more shocked to discover that the house is the one from his nightmares. Instead of an old witch, however, he finds that they are sharing the house with its owner, blind former concert pianist Andrew Mason (A Virgin Among the Living Dead's Paul Muller) and his visiting niece Sharon (Alien from the Deep's Marina Giulia Cavalli). Thing get stranger when Martha starts sleepwalking and disappearing into the gardens at night and Luke sees the old witch beating a priest to death in the front yard. When he finds the dead man's bible and discovers that the local priest has been killed that morning in an apparent motorcycle crash on the road not far from the house, he begs Elsa and his niece Debra (Maria Stella Musy) to visit but also finds a confidante in Sharon to Martha's jealousy. Strange events and disappearances always seem to coincide with Martha's sleepwalking, leading Sharon and Elsa to start to believe Luke's conviction that his wife is a witch. 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 Lost Souls and this film House of Witchcraft – proved too violent for television and instead they went to the video market in Italy and other territories (with most of us discovering them as Japanese-subtitled gray market tapes or British budget DVDs). The House of Witchcraft is not as fun as the other Lenzi entry, and the killings are mostly conventional stabbings, but the story is less predictable with a Lovecraftian bent during the first half until it becomes a body count picture with more echoes of Ghosthouse – from which the maggotty grim reaper makes a cameo appearance here – and young Debra's nerdy boyfriend (Alberto Frasca) sneaking in at night to provide another victim. Forest, an American blues musician and spoken word artist who was presumably discovered by Italian producers while touring and appeared in films like Tinto Brass' Miranda and Lenzi's Bridge to Hell, is post-dubbed by one of the usual Italian horror English dubbers but like most of the performers, he is as much a mouthpiece as Italian horror icon Muller for Lenzi's exposition-heavy dialogue – Lenzi is credited with the script but the story is attributed to Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper) and Daniele Stroppa (Appointment in Black, also starring Forest) – which actually does offer some backstory and clues to the final reveal but does not entirely tie things together. The film could have had something to say about hysterical male fears and projections onto women, particularly with its nightmare imagery and backstory of a witch's body discovered walled up in the villa's cellars, but the twist provides us with a possibly irrational reason for Luke to suspect his wife but not with a specific reason for him being targeted other than being a man. Particular benefits of Dania Film's funding for Lenzi is the gorgeous photography of Sergio Martino's regular DP Giancarlo Ferrando (Torso) of the medieval Tuscan villa and sprawling grounds, contrasting cool nocturnal blues and warm candle- and fire-lit interiors. Like The House of Lost Souls, apart from the original main title theme, the scoring credited to "Claude King" consists of recycled Claudio Simonetti cues; in this case mostly from Ruggero Deodato's Dial: Help and particularly one cue used here and in the other Lenzi film for shot of characters driving from one location to another. Italian horror bit part player Tom Felleghy (The Case of the Scorpion's Tail) has an uncredited appearance as a police inspector and Muller would appear briefly in Lenzi's subsequent direct-to-video Hell's Gate. 
Video
Unreleased in the United States on video or DVD – even at the time when Media Blasters was plundering Lenzi's catalogue for Shriek Show DVD releases – House of Witchcraft was difficult to see in English until British company Vipco put out a non-anamorphic, letterboxed, region free PAL DVD in 2002 which got the job done but looked rather flat and video-like (the same master appeared on German DVDs under the "Ghosthouse 4" title). While the Fulci "House of Doom" titles got an anamorphic upgrade stateside and in other territories, 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 – marks the film's stateside and 16:9 debut. Shot on the cheap in 16mm, the 4K restoration nevertheless reveals a handsome-looking picture with greens, blues, and reds that now pop in the image along with some warm sunlit exteriors and cool blue nocturnal sequences. The limitations of the photography are evident in scenes where the lighting is more stylized like Luke's "kitchen nightmare" where the firelight gels cast both actor and severed head prosthetic in the same sickly orange hue, but now the film feels like a gorier, more absurd episode of Hammer House of Horror than a direct-to-video programmer from the late stage of Lenzi's directorial career (which he did fortunately follow up with roughly twenty-five years as a novelist before his death in 2017). 
Audio
English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono options are provided with, respectively, optional English SDH and English subtitles. Both tracks are post-dubbed, with even American actors Forest and Cavalli dubbed by voice actors familiar to fans of Italian horror films dubbed in English. Either track is serviceable with the Italian possibly sounding a bit more "serious" to the less fluent. 
Extras
Extras start with an audio commentary by film historians Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth, and this is the place to start since House of Witchcraft was the first of the four shot and the commentators provide the most context for the series' origins on this track. Ercolani, particularly, provides background on how the rise of Berlusconi's private network Reteitalia as a rival to the public RAI created a sort of wild west where an influx of cash meant a lot of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck; such is the reason why productions that would eventually be determined too violent for television were greenlit at all with Lenzi not knowing television standard and Fulci not caring. They also reveal that not only was there so much product and money that shelving the four films until later for video was not a big deal, but some films that started out theatrically could end up as television premieres and some others vice versa. Ercolani reveals that the "Houses of Doom" was originally intended to be six films with various more established Italian horror directors approached before Marcello Avalone was picked for the fifth and sixth entries which were subsequently scrapped (he also reveals that Avallone's two theatrical horror films for Reteitalia Specters and Maya had actually started life as television films although they were not the "House of Doom" projects repurposed or rewritten). "Artisan of Mayhem" (19:26) is an interview with effects artist Elio Terribili who worked on the both the Lenzi and Fulci films but has little to say about either; that said, his recollections of working in the special effects industry are full of familiar behind the scenes names, anecdotes about working on the sets of films, as well as the various controversies in the industry, particularly those around prop weapons and how their regulation was handled in Italy versus Hollywood. "The House of Professionals" (18:36) is an interview with cinematographer Nino Celeste who shot the two Fulci films but who first worked with Lenzi on Free Hand for a Tough Cop (on which he was replaced by Luigi Kuveiller when he was blamed for unusable footage that was actually the result of one of the cost-cutting producers bring old stock for other productions, and the piece would be more fitting for one of the Fulci "House of Doom" discs – he does indeed appear on those – since he reveals that Fulci wanted a dream-like look for his films in the series which was achieved by tripling the fog filters in front of the lens. 
Overall
One of the harder films to see for stateside Umberto Lenzi fans, the low budget House of Witchcraft better reveals than some of his other for-hire late period works an Italian horror director still experimenting during the genre's last gasp.
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