One from the re watch pile…
The House of Clocks aka La Casa Nel Tempo(1989)

Film: When talking about my favourite films, one director’s name pops up with three example: Lucio Fulci. The films of his that always get a mention are The Beyond (a favourite), The City of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters. I grew up hiring these films from my local video shop, and pouring over any information I could glean from the pages of Fangoria, though those pages regularly show gore not necessarily present in the copies that I was hiring!

I have always dug Fulci’s explicit gore, even though for me it’s not a necessity, and cool set pieces, though sometimes… ok, a lot of the time, the message of the story, or in fact, the story of the story, doesnt feel like a completed entity. 

The House of Clocks is one of those films. This film is a part of the ‘doomed houses’ series of TV films made by Fulci and Umberto Lenzi (the others being The Sweet House of Horror, The House of Witchcraft and The House of Lost Souls), though Fulci’s entry was deemed to gory for TV and instead received a cinema and VHS release.

Three thieves decide to rob and old clock-collecting couple who go to drastic measures to keep a secret they have hidden from the outside world. Unfortunately, the robbery goes horribly wrong, and the old couple and their groundskeeper are killed during the course of the botched home invasion… but then, all the accumulated clocks starts running backwards, and the dead, live again!

For me, Fulci took his surrealism too far in this flick and it becomes a series of nonsensical set pieces that whilst you understand what is going on, it’s just not conveyed very well. I am sure this could be remade and could tell the story with far more cohesively than what Fulci has done here.

Score: **

Format: The reviewed copy of this film was the 2002 Shriek Show release, region 1 DVD which runs for approximately 83 minutes. It’s is presented in an extraordinarily foggy, washed out and dull 1.85:1 image with an English dubbed Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track which is far better than what the image would suggest.

Score: **

Extras: There is a couple of extras on this disc.

First we have trailers for The House of Clocks, Eaten Alive, Zombi 3, House on the Edge of the Park and Sweet House of Horrors. 

Next are two interviews, one with Paolo Paoloni and another with Carla Cassola. Unfortunately the sound with Paoloni is a bit dodgy, but they both seem to have nice recollections of the making of the film .

Score: **

WISIA: It’s not Fulci’s best film by a long shot, and I watched it once several years ago but not since. The only reason I rewatched it at all was for this review. I probably won’t watch it again unless I decide to do some kind of Fulci retrospective.