This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I think it all boils down to passion and driving force, the key thing that made Lucio Fulci the unique director he was and many of his movies absolutely fabulous. I can't really think of any director in the history of cinema who was so much about commitment and motivation. Maybe Edward D. Wood Jr, and that's an interesting comparison. While Fulci went straight on, seemingly against any possible sensibility and good advice, he had a style and a vision and an inner logic that somehow made it all work, albeit not for neither a traditional mainstream nor art-house crowd, whereas the same thing drove Edward D. Wood Jr to becoming known as the worst director of all time. It is a strange fine line though, because Ed Wood could certainly have made Sodoma's Ghost.When Lucio Fulci made movies he didn't just make a movie, it seems to me. With a history of both medical school and art criticism, I imagine him as this Leone-tempered butcher with a knack for art and a mind that's all happy trigger. The kid is going to get his brains drilled out, don't ask questions, it's not over the top! What do you mean you can't puke out your intestines!! I say it so it must be so! His creativity seems to have been radically set at random, he could to the silliest movies and still squeeze in some kind of more or less profound message and he could jump into whatever project that seemed reasonably interesting. Murder to the tune of the seven notes, "that sounds great! I want to make that movie!" Of course, when he pulled it all together, he made movies that, apart from being simply awesome, also totally challenge how we label art and genre in cinema. The Beyond for instance, is simply a great movie, but I can't really label it as anything else; A wonderful movie that could only have been created by a very specific and unique vision, executed with passion and driving force. And that was Fulci's trade and that's the reason that most of his movies are interesting, entertaining or at least positively watchable, if you appreciate him.That is also the reason why Sodoma's Ghost is a tragedy to watch. I don't know all that much about Fulci's life, so I can't speculate too much, but obviously he went downhill during the 90's and, if you follow the reasoning I presented just now, it must have been a mental fallback as well. Fulci's career was that of an explorer's and it seems logical that after being done with horror he could have ventured off into something else. True, all his later movies are more interested in more or less classical Gothic motifs, but it just isn't strong enough. Specially in the case of Sodoma's Ghost, which has got to be Fulci's weakest effort, and this is the key word here, 'weak'. On paper, Sodoma's Ghost has every chance to be a great Fulci movie. A nazi ghost in a cursed house infiltrates the minds of a bunch of kids on the road, making their own weakness their doom. It paves the way for his trademark pessimism, the eerie surrealism, clever gore and the classic Fulci theme of the human eyeball and "who sees what". I can even accept the hokey ending, which I won't give away. And once in a while, we are talking seconds or bare minutes of film, a splinter of a good thing appears. The first sequence is the only true good scene in the movie, but there are others involving our charismatic nazi ghost that float somewhere around the interest mark, but it never becomes worthwhile because you can so strongly sense the movie being simply dead.I never thought I'd have to say this about a Fulci movie, but the actors and their dialogs are crap. Who are these people? Maybe acting in Fulci movies in general isn't more "bad" than "melodramatic", but the people in front of the camera in Sodoma's Ghost look like random people picked up on the street. They read lines and make one or two attempts at acting, but what's worse is that Fulci has not given an attempt to make this movie worthwhile for anybody. "It's almost dark" the kids say upon arrival to the house, yet it's obviously daylight! They can't escape from the house - because they just can't! When the characters talk, you find that you barely comprehend the words they are saying, as said by these actors, because it is so stale and rudimentary that you begin to wonder if you shouldn't clean the house instead. One of the kids lay dead on the floor, the others mourn him. Minutes later they are cracking jokes by his corpse, which by the way is magically starting to fry. For a good part of the movie he lies around, they pass him and should see his oozing corpse, but not until they have to do they see his gory presence laying there in plain sight.There is not a single eyeball zoom-in in Sodoma's Ghost, and while some might think that is fan bigotry, I think it really is just an example of dead passion, or a way of thinking that this really isn't a Fulci movie at all. In fact, it ain't much of a movie at all! It consists of scenes, yes, but I think Sodoma's Ghost is more recorded data than a proper movie. There is not any point of reference given to make anybody understand the coherence of it, not in theme nor in plot, and as a director Fulci comes off as a dying animal in this movie. The shots seem barely finished, the movie barely cut together and you know, on a pure quality level, Bruno Mattei did better movies than this.

1943: A gang of especially dissolute Nazis drink, snort coke, cavort with some unappealing prostitutes and film the entire sick scene until the Allies attack and ruin the party. (The assault consists of stock footage and ONE explosion from a lesser bomb than this movie. I don't know how I stood the excitement!) 1988: Six typically annoying teen-agers, played by poorly-dubbed actors, arrive at a remote villa that--big surprise--turns out to be the site of the shenanigans mentioned above. One of them is battered and seduced by a Nazi ghost, though she has little to say about it to her friends the next day.The youngsters try to leave the house and of course find it impossible to do so. They are further beset by a couple of Nazi specters in between long stretches of nothing happening. There are only two notable set-pieces before the lame, lazy finale: a prolonged eye-candy scene involving a topless, mega-breasted teen and a female succubus, and a murder victim's corpse putrefying before his friends' eyes.Like most of Fulci's later work, this has none of the atmosphere or memorable characters found in his early horrors. The minimal gore is totally uninspired and unenthusiastic this time out. I can't believe this picture was directed by the same guy who gave us ZOMBIE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE BEYOND.When it comes to "NW" (Nazi Whorehouse) pot-boilers, this ranks as one of the worst. Next to SODOMA'S GHOST, trash like HELL TRAIN starts to look good, and David Friedman's LOVE CAMP 7 just looks better than ever.

During the 'golden age' of Italian gore films (the late 70s–early 80s), director Lucio Fulci was at the top of his game, delivering extreme doses of graphic violence that more or less compensated for his less-than-stellar story lines. By the mid 80s however, the master of outrageous splatter was on something of a downward slide: his Flashdance-inspired giallo Murderock (1984) left fans dissatisfied due to its lack of creative killing; Aenigma (1987), a supernatural revenge tale inspired by De Palma's Carrie, suffered from an awful script that offered several laughable death scenes (including a ridiculous snail attack!); and A Touch of Death (1988), although very gory, proved almost unwatchable thanks to an incomprehensible plot and a few heavy-handed attempts at comedy.However, worse was still to come: 1988 also saw the release of Fulci's The Ghosts of Sodom, a very weak ghost story that relied heavily on stale genre clichés, used copious amounts of nudity and softcore sex to try and detract from its awful acting and lousy dialogue, and which totally failed to dish out the carnage.The film opens in a remote French villa during WW2, where a Nazi orgy ends with a bang (literally) when the place suffers a direct hit from an air raid. The action then cuts to the present day, and follows six travellers en route to Paris who stumble upon the (strangely intact) villa after taking a shortcut (I said this movie was clichéd, didn't I?). After opting to spend the night in the old building (which, to their surprise, is fully furnished, has electricity, and offers a great selection of vintage wine in its cellar), the group suffer from a series of terrifying supernatural occurrences that tests their friendship and pushes them to the edge of sanity...In the right hands (or should that be 'wrong hands'), this tale of debauched sex, ghostly prostitutes, and repressed lesbianism (one of the girls is a closet rug-muncher) could have been a slice of exploitation heaven; Fulci, unfortunately, fumbles the ball, and manages to make his salacious subject matter seem incredibly dull: his sex scenes are not nearly sleazy enough and the horror simply lacks guts. After 85 minutes of mind-numbingly naff Nazi nonsense and ghostly guff, Fulci ends his film with an insipid cop-out finalé, which sees all six friends (even the supposedly dead ones!) escaping with their lives from the (now ruined) building.Possibly the least entertaining horror film by the director (I still have a few more to watch, but I can't see how they could be any worse), The Ghosts of Sodom is definitely one to avoid.

This is another film which stands as the perfect showcase for director Fulci’s sad decline throughout his final years (actually, this is the third such example I’ve watched) and, by extension, that of the popular “Euro-Cult” style.It opens in 1943 with a (hilarious) orgy at a secluded villa by a group of perverted Nazis, which one of them conveniently films – a sequence which is haphazardly intercut with genuine stock footage of the war. The scene then shifts to the present day with a group of teenagers who happen upon the villa and decide to spend the night there: one of the girls is seduced by the ghost of the amateur film-maker but wakes up to find that, apparently, it was only a dream! The gang departs in the morning but, mistakenly, take a roundabout route which invariably brings them back to the dilapidated villa; this time, they discover that they can’t leave the premises – the phone which was previously working is now dead, and the exits have all been mysteriously blocked! Soon, one of them is engaged in a game of Russian Roulette with the same ghostly Nazi, who even offers him a night with a prostitute if he comes out alive: amazingly, he does but the sexual encounter doesn’t quite go the way he planned! At this, he goes berserk and attacks one of his friends – but falls down a flight of steps and is killed. Later on, the prostitute herself appears to the most hysterical of the girls (who harbors a lesbian affection towards one of her companions) – the older woman shows her her friend making out with the third girl of the group but, when she goes to confront them, finds that it was ‘all in her mind’! Then, it’s the turn of the girl who first met the Nazi to become involved with one of the boys (for whom she had hitherto showed no interest) – but, as soon as he touches her, the girl’s skin starts to come off! Eventually, the gang discovers the reel of footage shot by the Nazis intact and they watch it in an attempt to solve the enigma in which they’ve become unwittingly entangled – this is followed by the Nazis suddenly appearing to break down the doors, an explosion…and, then, the whole gang wakes up from a deep slumber in front of the ruins of the villa in question! Doh!! The film, then, is a mix of haunted-house horror (involving the typical obnoxious-vacationing-teenagers-getting-lost angle) and Nazisploitation (with the soft-porn elements that this entails) which can, perhaps, best be described as hypnotically bad. While Fulci might have done something with this plot in his heyday, here he’s defeated by a boring cast (though the girls, at least, look good in and out of clothes) and the utterly gratuitous gore mandated by the genre at this juncture (but which the evidently shoestring budget couldn’t hope to satisfy in a convincing manner!).