From Bedrooms To Billions

It’s very strange watching people recontextualise stuff you did as a kid for fun as a world changing revolutionary event. Who would have thought that typing swear words into text adventures to see what they said back was part of something so major.

House 4: The Repossession

Not released as a La Casa movie in Italy, but was released as House 4 in the USA which confused them because they didn’t have a House 3. Follows the theme of the others in that it’s another unrelated story set in a house, though somewhere late in production somebody decided it should be related and hastily wrote in the main character from the first movie without explaining why he now has a new wife, a daughter instead of a son, a second haunted house, an evil step brother and a native American best friend.

House III: The Horror Show

Taking the biscuit a little bit in that the story has no connection to the other House movies, neither is any house integral to the plot, this wasn’t even released as a House movie in the USA. It was however released as a La Casa movie in Italy, though it had to be titled La Casa 7 because Joe D’Amato had already reserved La Casa 6 for his own project that never got made.

The film itself is a dull rip-off of Wes Craven’s Shocker with nothing to make it stand apart, which is probably why they tried to fool people into seeing it with all this ‘House’ bullshit.

House II: The Second Story

This would be a fucking awful kids adventure movie if the cast consisted of kids, but everybody’s an adult so instead it’s a fucking awful kids movie made worse by everybody desperately trying to pretend it isn’t. Has no connection to the first House movie whatsoever, though given it features a House with portals to alternate dimensions it does have a vague commonality with the Italian La Casa series, of which this is unofficially considered to be part 6 despite being released before parts 3, 4 & 5.

Watch Me When I Kill [Il gatto dagli occhi di giada/ The Cat’s Victims]

A later giallo, by which time the films were becoming fairly indistinct, this being no exception.

Jason X

A thoroughly enjoyable mix of outrageous death, self awareness and bare midriffs.

Eyeball [Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro]

An Agatha Christie style parlour mystery where every time there’s a stabbing the entire cast turn up just afterward ensuring they all remain under suspicion for the entire duration of the movie, which might make sense in a parlour but this is set on a coach trip around Barcelona.

The Dark Half

Romero’s last movie, before studios would only give him money if his titles ended in ‘of the Dead,’ is a pretty decent doppelgänger slasher movie with some impressive sparrow wrangling in the back half.