I do not forgive this movie for wasting 90 minutes I could have better used turning my compost pile.
There is a child, supposedly a boy, named "Bob." "Bob," or, as I like to call him, "Diana," is an effeminate midget with fishy lips, and long, platinum blond hair that would be more appropriate on a Swedish girl. He-she is dubbed in a nasal, liquid voice that really aggravates his most noticeable quality: he's a stupid, fey dwarf who detracts from this movie in the sense that he's often the scariest thing on-screen in this ridiculous "film."
A good case in point is when the creepy babysitter, who has allowed caterpillars to roost on her face where other people have eyebrows, stupidly locks herself in the decrepit basement. She finds herself, of course, about to be murdered by the inexplicably animated corpse of the house's former owner, Dr Freudstein. So, she pounds on the door and screams at the top of her lungs for help. DianaBob's reaction to all this pounding and screaming is to stare at his stuffed monkey (a sign of something, surely) for a few minutes, before taking a pink squirt-gun in hand and finally deciding to rescue the by-now-dead babysitter. You must watch this ludicrous scene to appreciate it: the killer, wielding an absurdly large knife, takes not less than 45 seconds of movie time to climb the stairs leading to his victim; Bob doesn't even START TOWARDS THE DOOR until his babysitter is already dead. This farce of an action sequence descends all the way to the ninth level when DianaBob, having finally opened the basement door, finds himself in the same predicament as his babysitter. Thinking quickly, he runs up the stairs and then CLOSES HIS FOREARM IN THE DOOR. Now, when most people, even small children, close their arms in doors, their basic instinct is to open the door a bit to dislodge the arm. Not Bob. Bob remains stuck in the door up to his elbow because HE KEEPS TRYING TO CLOSE THE DOOR ON HIS ARM. He doesn't think to open the door and free himself, of course, until the walking corpse has closed to within six inches of grabbing his hand. I realize that this scene was supposed to add drama, or something, to the movie, but it ends up being only illogical and silly.
There are lots of reasons to hate this movie: the English dubbing is typically terrible, something for which I can't hold the Italians who made the film responsible. However, the Italian-to-English script translation should have been better. The English voice-actors are universally horrible, and the person doing "Bob's" voice is the worst. He sounds, at best, like a sniveling toddler, even in the most banal scenes.
The droning, ersatz soundtrack, laced with obnoxious synthesizer warbling, is unforgivable. I have heard more adept, emotionally relevant music on a Game Boy game's soundtrack. It crescendos from silence to onslaught almost instantaneously, and, without exception, clashes with what little atmosphere this movie creates.
Technical ineptitude isn't the worst thing about this film. The characters are utterly one-dimensional. They act without reason or perceivable logic, and they are oblivious to their environment. Worse than that, they're stupid. Bob's mother actually tells him that the babysitter may have gone home to see her parents after she is killed; in fact, Bob's parents make a career of ignoring pretty much everything Bob says or does. The babysitter herself is never explained. In fact, Bob's mother doesn't seem to think it strange at all that a pale, creepy young woman, who doesn't ever, ever speak, materializes from nowhere to look after her son. The father, whose job is merely a convenient excuse to get the family in the house in the first place, bobs randomly in and out of the movie, saying little and contributing nothing.
The story is an incomprehensible labyrinth; perhaps trying to understand just what the hell is going on is supposed to be the challenging part about this movie. There isn't any plot to speak of, and neither is there any story worth remembering. People say things, go places, and are then killed. The killing scenes are graphic and bloody; they're also extremely overdone, and more silly than scary. The makeup effects are done well, but not good enough to redeem this film in any way.
Toward the end of the film, which I won't give away, the voice-actor's director has Bob's character whine and snivel and cry and moan and weep into the microphone: the sounds DO NOT AT ALL correlate with what is happening onscreen. This part of the movie is so unbelievably irritating that it deserves it's own paragraph, but it's futile. You just can't understand how irritating it is to listen to Bob's English voice make these noises while the Bob onscreen looks only mildly upset. You must see it and hear it to understand.
There are many, many other illogical and ludicrous events, actions, and circumstances prancing around this film, mocking your intelligence and giving your reason the finger. Watch it with pen-and-notebook and see what you can find that I haven't mentioned. (You can trust that I noticed!)
This is an amateurish, poorly executed movie, made for no other reason than to shock with extreme gore. It's good for a few laughs and nothing else; it's not even worth the six bucks it costs to buy it. The only valuable thing about it is that it serves as a darkly hilarious reminder of what to never, ever do with camera and film.
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