La Casa series

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2021) As film history has it, the first two Evil Dead movies were released in Italy as the first instalments of “La Casa” series, which was followed by three other unrelated haunted-house films released as sequels despite having nothing to do with the first two films, either in production, tone or continuity. La Casa 5 certainly needed the marketing boost because it has little to offer by itself. At heart a bog-standard haunted house story with a little bit of The Amityville Horror and The Exorcist as a centrepiece, it belongs to the school of low-budget, low-effort horror that thinks that simply throwing more stuff into the mix automatically makes it better. The result, alas, is a big messy blob with witches, killers, priests and flying objects—with a subpar execution sucking much of the fun out of it. Horror fans will note, but not be surprised, that it’s directed by Trolls 2 filmmaker Claudio Fragasso. Is there anything more to add after that?