When Vipco announced the DVD release I rushed out and bought a copy. Despite actually getting the DVD some 6 years ago it has taken me till now to watch the DVD, I simply forgot all about it. What I learned from my viewing however is that 20 years ago I must have been quite sad to have gone to so much effort over a movie like this.

In a house in the middle of nowhere a disturbed child kills the pet cat, after a good telling off by her father she goes one step further and kills him and her mother too. A hundred odd miles away a CB radio enthusiast picks up a strange transmission, a creepy nursery rhyme style chant, and the sounds of a terrible murder. Strangely enough though the murder that has been heard has yet to occur.

Sometimes memories are better than the reality, and having glanced around the internet it seems I'm not alone in my views, people having fond memories of the movie only to see it X years down the line and dislike it intensely.

I cannot put into words how much I disliked this movie, but I'll have a pretty good try. Firstly the story itself is just bizarre, one of those stories that if you zone out for a few minutes you completely lose the plot of what's going on, and to be perfectly honest you care even less too. One minute the leads are in the city, and then the country, then back again; in between having lovers spats. You might think this is a trick of clever script-writing; this really is not the case however. The story skips at great rate through a series of killings, all of which are seemingly unexplained, without purpose.

The cast are a pretty odd bunch, this is a rare oddity, an Italian movie without any Italian cast, and there are British, French, German, Spanish and American but no Italians at all. Don't go thinking this adds to the quality, believe me this is not the case, not only can the cast not act; it's often difficult to tell them apart, at least in the young cast anyway. The one exception to this was Tina played by Kate Silver, this young actress was clearly annoying and clearly one you wait for her demise, sadly she is a minor and it soon becomes apparent that if everyone else in the movie is destined to die she will not be one of them.

The movie has one distressing factor, and its only UK viewers that will get this. From the 80's backwards to the birth of television on BBC channels we had something called the testcard; this was shown in hours when there was no television channels. During which an image of a girl with a doll would grace our screens. While the doll in Ghosthouse differs dramatically, the girl and the resemblance is striking, that innocent thing from my youth was a killer!!!

The movie is terribly dull; highlights include one of the hero's falling through a floor into a pool of milk, or something worse. His reward for surviving this terror is a brutal butchering by his girlfriend who assumes him to be some sort of fiend.

The movies score is awful, the same repetitive music haunts the movie frequently, I mean every 5 minutes or so. Then to add insult to injury we have the "chant" a sort of nursery rhyme that is used to address impending danger what the rhyme's lyrics are is unclear but I tend to think of it being something along the lines of "Hello baby baby hello baby baby baby" all done in a voice that sounds like a frog inhaling helium.

Ghosthouse is devoid of anything redeeming, I find it the worst example of a bad director's career; it flaps around making a lot of noise but ultimately flounders in a pool of its own bile.

There are some interesting facts surrounding the movie however, when released in Italy it was launched as La Casa 3, the Evil Dead movies being launched as La Casa and La Casa 2 (this was before Army Of Darkness), apparently the movie cashed in on the back of this. Asecond interesting factor isthat despite the fact that Umberto Lenzi was not the best of the Italian directors, he was still a highly bankable name, however for Ghosthouse he assumed the identity as Hubert Humphrey, was this to link the movie with America (giving it an American theme) or was it that he realised the movie was so bad that he never wanted to put his name to it?

If you're tempted into the phenomenal world of Italian horror, which is a journey any horror fan should take; Ghosthouse is not a place to start or end, it's simply a place to avoid with a bargepole.