The year 1988 would see director Umberto Lenzi deliver a new haunted house movie to audiences everywhere, called La Casa 3, or Ghosthouse, as it were. The man would write and direct a plethora of films over his lifetime, including ‘So Sweet… So Perverse’ twenty years prior to this and while the man still had the chops to make an entertaining picture, Ghosthouse would end up being fairly tame compared to past works.

There was nothing overly wrong with the movie, nothing that would make a person sit up and exclaim that there was fault, yet if anything needed a definite improvement, it was the script. Starring Lara Wendel, Mary Sellers, Greg Scott, and more, they would do a decent job of it, or at least as best they could. The material was not quite as strong as one might have liked, and given that there had been more than a few haunted house movies up until this point in time, something was needed to set it apart from the chaff. It all came down to the story and script. The tale itself was not all that bad, but the dialogue was terrible at times, and even with the movie featuring better actors, it is doubtful that they could have sold it any better. Hearing the actors in this picture deliver the lines they did, it is no wonder that they seemed more amateurish than not, and it goes to prove that making a movie starts from the ground up, needing a solid foundation to start with; otherwise, it simply does not work.

All of it begins after a little girl has killed her cat, and when her father finds out, he locks her in the basement as punishment. That night, the man and his wife are killed with the daughter still locked up downstairs, and as the film cuts away, the audience sees her take comfort with a clown doll, a creepy-looking toy if there ever were one. Decades later, a ham radio operator picks up some strange transmissions and decides to investigate with his girlfriend. It leads him to the same house featured at the beginning of the movie, where he discovers the source of the feed and other strange findings. It is not long before people start to die and by the end of it all, there are only a few left standing. The movie ends on a note of horror and further tragedy, a surprisingly perfect little scene to cap off the film.

As it stands, Lenzi does manage to pepper the film with some good scares, most of it courtesy of the clown doll and a creepy song that gets sung, usually when someone is about to die or is dead. The atmosphere in the house is fantastic, appropriately heavy and moody, and it lends more to the horror that takes place than anything else. There is a bit of blood and gore throughout, not overly much, but enough to drive home the fact that the people inside have indeed met their end. The fact that the house felt so claustrophobic and the way it feels like a character itself proves that Lenzi still has the chops to make a scary film, even with the flaws that run through it. Ghosthouse may not feature in the top ten of scary haunted house movies, but it is still fairly decent when all is said and done.

2.5 out of 5