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The House of Clock: Standard Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Cauldron Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (17th July 2025). |
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The Film
 Vittorio and Sara Corsini (And the Ship Sails On's Paolo Paolini and Damned in Venice's Bettine Milne) live in a remote villa in the Italian countryside in peaceful solitude. Vittorio fills his days with his clocks and watches which he has been collecting for seventy years while Sara does her gardening. They regularly take time out to tend to the rotting corpses of their nephew (Paolo Bernardi) and his wife (Francesca DeRose) who they murdered when they realized the younger couple was less interested in being a happy family than in their money. Housekeeper Maria (The Sect's Carla Cassola) discovers their secret and decides to beat a hasty retreat only to end up with her her entrails fertilizing Sara's roses when one-eyed groundskeeper Peter (Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle's Al Cliver) plants her six feet under. When they accept the hospitality of Diana (Voices from Beyond's Karina Huff) under the cover story of her car breaking down, they are unprepared for a home invasion conducted by her boyfriend Tony (Black Demons' Keith van Hoven) and his pal Paul (Bloody Psycho's Peter Hintz) which culminates in an unintended bloodbath. When Vittorio gasps his last breath, all of the clocks and watches in the house stop – including Tony's own digital watch – and the trio discover that they cannot leave since Peter set out the guard dogs after they broke in. The trio settle in for the night, planning to make a run for it in the morning, but the clocks all come back to life again, running backwards and the trio discover how their hosts deal with "parasites." Opening with a quote attributed to Balzac, "… if time turned back, our sins would also have to start anew…" The House of Clocks scripted by Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper), and Daniele Stroppa (The Wax Mask) is one of the better films of Lucio Fulci's late career when he was battling poor health and low budgets, and also the best of the four "House of Doom" films commissioned for Italian television by Reteitalia from Luciano Martino's Dania Film – the other three being Fulci's The Sweet House of Horrors and the Umberto Lenzi duo The House of Witchcraft and The House of Lost Souls – but not broadcast at the time because they were too gory. Like the other "House of Doom" entries, the film has a nice long atmospheric setup before degenerating into the usual stalk and kill mechanics but the effects work of Pino Ferrante (Hell of the Living Dead) – echoing some of Giannetto De Rossi's earlier work for Fulci including a spike to the abdomen that punches a hole to the other side a la City of the Living Dead and the climactic gut shot for Antonio Margheriti's Cannibal Apoalcypse – is sticker than the Lenzi films (although a bit involving a cat thankfully never convinces due to the animal obviously being a puppet that Ferrante and Fulci possibly also employed for both Demonia and A Cat in the Brain), busier sound design also recalling the earlier Fulcis, and an original score by Vince Tempera (Silver Saddle) rather than the recycled Claudio Simonetti cues of the Lenzi entries. Although the intriguing concept is not fully exploited – the film shares some of the same tehemes of temporaland spatial displacement with Luigi Cozzi's similar stalk and slash in a damned house film Paganini Horror from the same period – there are some surprises for the viewer as Vittorio, Sara, and Peter also come to realize that their resurrection is due to time not only turning backwards but also accelerating, which means that soon there are a couple more vengeful walking corpses out for blood. While Fulci still had the recursive A Cat in the Brain, the okay Voices from Beyond, the bland Demonia, and the Twilight Zone-y Door to Silence ahead of him, The House of Clocks might probably have been the better coda out of these. 
Video
Unreleased on home video in the United States, The House of Clocks first became available in English-friendly form as a Japanese-subtitled VHS, but easier options would come early on in the DVD era with a letterboxed DVD in the U.K. from Vipco and a 16:9 upgrade in the U.S. from Media Blasters' Shriek Show line as part of their Fulci series. Cauldron Films debuted a new 4K restoration on Blu-ray last year as part of the now long sold out "House of Doom" six-disc set consisting of the two Fulci films, the two Lenzi films, and CD soundtracks for both of the Fulcis. Cauldron's standard edition features the same 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer. The four films were lensed in 16mm so they are considerably grainier than Fulci's and Lenzi's 35mm features but Fulci goes further with cinematographer Nino Celeste (The Spider Labyrinth) in stacking multiple soft focus glass filters in front of the lenses in both of his films to give them a "dreamy" look of blooming, flaring highlights and fine detail only really evident in some extreme close-ups (those not shot with the telephoto end of a zoom lens) revealing the amount of make-up put on Paolini and Milne to make them look decrepit and Cliver's puzzling eye prosthetic. Compared to the older masters which looked like various degrees of degraded video, the high definition transfer looks great simply because it makes greater sense of what Fulci and Celeste were doing visually. 
Audio
Audio options include English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks – English SDH and English subtitles must be selected from the setup options and cannot be toggled via remote – with the English dub featuring some familiar voices but sometimes poorly cast as to be laughable like poor Milne's dubber trying to sound old – while the Italian track features a more somber tone in which the intended comic touches fare better. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historians Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth who discuss the film favorably in the context of his later eighties and nineties work and his poor health at the time. Thompson and Howarth provide some background on his other theatrical works of the time that got international coverage in the horror press with the hope for Fulci and fans that each one would be his comeback only to go unreleased at the time and then later to video and DVD while Ercolani provides background on his other works including the "Lucio Fulci Presents" series and the question as to who much he "supervised" on them and the resulting lawsuit when he broke his contract with the producers to do A Cat in the Brain (which Ercolani describes as "overvalued" in Fulci's filmography and the remarks of the others suggest that the film is ripe for reassessment as a supposed precursor to the likes of Wes Craven's New Nightmare). They also look at the film's characters in the context of the otherwise leftist Fulci's seemingly contradictory opinions on youth culture, the innocence of children, the deceptively benign older characters, and Fulci's own view of himself as the underdog who projected a grotesque and disagreeable image as a defense mechanism and also suggest that his noted terrible treatment of actors was more targeted and strategic than it appeared. They also discuss Fulci's beginnings in comedy, how Italian comedy has not translated to English-speaking audiences, and the strain of black humor that runs through his works, particularly later ones like this and Touch of Death, the work of cinematographer Celeste, and also point out the presences of Massimo Sarchielli (Mother of Tears) and the film's property master Vincenzo Luzzi who became part of the key art for A Cat in the Brain with his small role as chainsaw-wielding hallucination.  In "Lighting the House of Time" (24:45), cinematographer Celeste discusses his beginnings working under cinematographer Guilio Albonico (Puzzle) on documentaries and meeting Fulci working in television. He compares his working relationship with Fulci to the director's with his previous regular cinematographer Sergio Salvati (Zombie), reveals that he was supposed to shoot A Cat in the Brain but was out of the country on another film but Fulci put the same trust in his operator Sandro Grossi as Celeste himself. Of The House of Clocks, Celeste discusses the look that Fulci wanted with multiple filters stacked on top of on another and the tests they carried out to get the final look. In "Time and Music" (28:26), composer Tempera discusses how he came to work with Franco Bixio and Fabio Frizzi (The Beyond) and their early credits employing electronic music as well as composing themes rather than spotting cues in the Hollywood style. He also reveals an early assignment in scoring the opening of Luigi Cozzi's reissue of Godzilla which restored the first five minutes cut from the original release identifying American atomic testing as the origin of the monster and for which there was no pre-existing Italian dialogue, music, or effects. "Working with a Master" (23:56) is an interview with the late first assistant director Michele de Angelis whose first assignment had been driving Fulci to the set of a film during which they formed a rapport and ended up working as his assistant during the "Lucio Fulci Presents" films and most of his later films. He also briefly touches upon The Wax Mask which Fulci was supposed to direct before he died, Fulci's opinions on Dario Argento, and on the budgets with which they worked respectively. De Angelis later produced the DVD releases of several Italian genre titles for NoShame Films and Alan Young Pictures. "Time with Fulci" (19:18) is an interview with effects artist Elio Terribili who recalls getting into the business casually helping out Roberto Ricci (Hands of Steel), Fulci's habits of starting fights on the set including with his assistant director daughter Camilla Fulci who he had high hopes to become Italy's first female horror director. Ported over from the Shriek Show disc are a pair of English-language interviews with actor Paolo Paolini (5:28) who speaks vaguely about the film and Fulci's professionalism while actress Carla Cassola (9:32) recalls her special effects death scene and not only being claustrophobic during the scene in which she is under the dirt but also annoyed with the crew's lack of appreciation for what she went through. The interview with actor Al Cliver (1:32) is a snippet from the documentary "Voices from Beyond" and has nothing to do with the film at hand. The disc also includes the interesting video promotional trailer (4:42) with its video switcher graphics, tape damage, and different dubbing (the voices are different and Diana is called Sandra here). Ercolani noted that this was not unusual to find different dubbing in English trailers for Italian films and suggested a number of reasons. We presume the reason was that this raggedly-edited trailer was thrown together from the video transfer struck for the television master and video master for international sales and that only these bits were dubbed to get it out quickly before the full dub was cast and recorded. 
Overall
While Fulci still had the recursive A Cat in the Brain, the okay Voices from Beyond, the bland Demonia, and the Twilight Zone-y Door to Silence ahead of him, The House of Clocks might probably have been the better coda out of these.
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