La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) Acceptably executed but narratively suspect, La casa 3 best shows its low-budget exploitation roots in the way it throws better movies in a blender and tries to pass the incoherent result as something that is worth our attention. It has a haunted house, creepy clown dolls, spooky time-travelling radio signals, an exploding mirror, and a bus-smashing downer finale — if you’re expecting all of those elements to fit together harmoniously, well, it’s not for nothing that the film is well known in so-bad-it’s good circles. It does help that the film, written and helmed by Italian exploitation veteran Umberto Lenzi, is rather better shot than would be the norm for lower-budgeted, markedly commercial films such as this one. The creepy clown doll is rather better than the rest of the film and so are snippets of the score, but that’s really not quite enough to shake the low-imagination, slap-dash way La casa 3 is put together. The story, characters and individual plot beats are terrible in ways that the presentation can’t quite overcome.