An incoherent nursery rhyme

When I was about fourteen, my dad was going to hit the video store. I told him to pick me up a horror movie. He came back with one called Ghosthouse. I'd never heard of it but that night I popped the tape into the VCR and gave it a blind watch. What followed scared the living hell out of me. The next day I asked my day if by chance the box had anything with a creepy clown doll on it.

"Oh yeah, I think it did!", was his response. Face palm. After the childhood trauma of Poltergeist, the last thing I wanted to see was a nearly identical evil clown doll. But Ghosthouse threw one at me anyways. And today I'm throwing the same little guy at you. Today's film is GHOSTHOUSE.

This is the original box that my dad spied those years ago.

And here's the actual film on YouTube.

Ghosthouse tells the story of a ham radio enthusiast that picks up a weird signal complete with a muddled nursery rhyme music and screams for help. Sherlock and friends trace the signal to a creepy old house that coincidentally is the same house used in Fulci's House By the Cemetery. There they meet the scariest damn groundskeeper this side of Scooby Doo, played by Donald O'Brien from Zombie Holocaust/ DR. Butcher MD.

They also discover that the voice on the recording belongs to a guy that's sort of camping out with his friends in an RV in front of the house, although the guy doesn't understand how that is possible.

Seems we have us a haunted house here, kids! Because as the film starts we were given a gruesome introduction to the house's ghostly inhabitant. The ghost of a young girl with her clown doll.

From this point on, the house starts racking up a body count. And before the bad stuff happens we always get to hear this unnerving children's music with a voice muttering something incoherent over it. And we get to see Ms. Creepalot and Jiggles the clown. Oh, and that's the clown's happy face. Want to see his angry face?

Yeah, this is why this movie scared that young me all those years ago. This movie throws many gory supernatural death scenes at you. Some pretty messed up stuff. It's a surprisingly effective chiller and although it has a cheese factor to it that was not apparent when I originally watched it, it still holds up as a decent little horror film. Part of the reason may be that it was directed by none other that Umberto Lenzi himself, under a pseudonym. Produced by Joe D'Amato too. So it's got that Italian horror mix that kind of works Lucio Fulci into the folds with that house. Apparently there also a new RiffTrax available for this film as well. That could be fun.

Oh, this film is known as La Casa 3 in Italy. It was supposed to be an unofficial sequel to Evil Dead 2.

To this day, there still is not an official region 1 DVD or BluRay release of Ghosthouse so this might be your best way to catch this old favorite. Somewhere I still have that old original VHS with the cover at the top of the page that I bought years later on amazon. It's one of my favorite VHS tapes.