I honestly don't know if I can say enough bad about this movie. Don't be fooled by the fact that it's a Lucio Fulci movie; it actually is. But it's not a "zombie" movie, if you're looking for zombies. It's incredibly stupid, slow, dull, uninteresting, full of bratty kids (that you hope will get devoured by zombies the first 5 minutes into the movie), and just... I have no words. This may very well have ruined my fondness for Lucio Fulci films. The ground that Fulci stood on was (for me) already getting shakier with The Beyond (why everyone loves that is BEYOND my comprehension) and then recently The House by The Cemetery. But those at least had some gore and gruesome parts in it. This...This was just completely ridiculous. There was nothing - NOT ONE THING - that was remotely "scary" or even creepy in this film; it was just STUPID. And the scene with the stuffed birds... I stopped myself from fast-forwarding through it but what an insult to the intelligence of his viewers. How completely stupid. Do NOT - I don't care if you're the hardest of the die-hard Lucio Fulci fans - DO NOT waste your time on this steaming tub of pig dung. This wasn't even "So Bad It's Good"; this was just plain AWFUL. I hate myself for wasting an hour and a half of my life sitting through this.
PS: You're an hour and seventeen minutes into a film that's only an hour and twenty-eight minutes long, before you finally see a rotting arm come crashing through a wall and you think, "Yay! Finally...some good ol' rotting corpses!" but do not be misled: it's only an arm, and the scene is only a few seconds long. This was NOT a "good zombie film". This was not a "good" anything film. This movie SUCKED. Period.
Review by BronsonBlockedParent2023-01-05T03:50:37Z— updated 2023-01-20T06:53:22Z
Per the movie's synopsis, I thought this was going to be an Exorcist rip off, and it is... but not until late in the second act, and only two scenes. No, this is more of a Poltergeist rip off.
So, Fulci fans are going to enjoy the familiar look and feel here, but even hardcore Fulci fans are going to have a difficult time overlooking the flaws within.
The dialog is utter shit, and the acting is the kind that only makes sense in a Fulci movie. That is to say it's terrible. Weird shit happens and people just stand there.
The editing is garbage: the movie will have a scene, then it just cuts to a different scene midway through, only to have it cut elsewhere. The worst moment like this is when the building super (I think) is riding the elevator, which becomes effected by evil (somehow), causing the floor to fall out, and the dude presumably dies, but we never see the death, and it's never mentioned. Was it not in the budget? Did they just forget to shoot it?
I was going to talk about how bad the casting was in terms of the May/December parents, but it stopped mattering once the other issues became overwhelming.
Look, are Fulci fans going to like this? Maybe. There's a little bit of gore, and you get the trademark atmosphere, but it is paper thin otherwise.
I think the overall story is just so ridiculous that it's a waste of time. What do I mean? Well, the super scary Egyptian curse is delivered to a little girl by a blind women, by way of an eye of Horus pendant. In a very Hellraiser-esque twist, we get a final scene, back in Egypt, where the blind women has given the pendant to another little girl. What's her fucking problem?
Post Script: A snake is killed in the first act. They actually shot a snake to death for this shitty movie. The scene was pointless, and could have been cut, not effecting the story at all. Lucio should be ashamed of himself - I'm aware he's dead, but still. The Italians were notorious for their animal abuse during that era, but Lucio was the exception... until here. What a shit movie, and what a sick way to treat a defenseless animal.