Umberto Lenzi

  • La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2020) I have no perceptible affection for circa-1980 Italian horror films (whether they’re about zombies of cannibals—same difference) but there were a few times in Nightmare City when I caught myself thinking, “Hey, this is almost interesting.” Not often, and never for too long, but still—I suppose I’m reacting more favourably to the idea of a city-wide zombie emergency, to the promising opening sequence (in which a cargo plane disgorges a group of zombies, effectively beginning the apocalypse), and to an audaciously dumb double-jot-nightmare ending. Alas, it doesn’t amount to much because director Umberto Lenzi doesn’t have the budget nor the wits to keep this interesting on a moment-to-moment basis. The makeup effects are not good, and the film’s cheap production values keep undermining whatever it wanted to do: gore in a well-made film can be tolerable, but it just looks laughable and pretentious in a cheap film like Nightmare City. Whatever promise it has is frequently wiped out, and, in the end, only confirmed my prejudices against that horror film subgenre.