ShangLuda Admirable film.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

BA_Harrison 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.

MARIO GAUCI 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!).

HumanoidOfFlesh Lucio Fulci's "The Ghosts of Sodom" is so dumb that it's very difficult not being at least a little entertained by it.A group of kids arrives at the old Nazi mansion and soon they are haunted by Nazis from the past."The Ghosts of Sodom" must be among the worst films made by Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci.There is almost none of the Fulci magic left.The film is also pretty boring and filled with unnecessary dialogue.There is plenty of nudity,so if you like them sleazy you won't be disappointed.No gore to speak of apart from some nice shots of decaying corpse.The film is quite rare and hard to find,so if you like Italian horror give it a look.4 out of 10.

Phroggy This one is extremely inept, and Fulci has lost everything that was his style. Nothing makes sense in this classical haunted-house story chock-full of "Dumb-teenagers-gets-killed" clichés. Avoid it.