If you want an idea of what kind of night I was in for when I bought my ticket to The House by the Cemetery two Fridays ago, consider this: the first thing I saw when I entered the 1966 hall was a topless lady being cut by a razor blade, while a German voiceover narrated something about a serial killer. Damn, Belcourt, way to gently lower your audience into the sticky morass of exploitation cinema.
After a month of dubious comedies, The Belcourt's midnight movie series returned to horror-movie form by showing Lucio Fulci's 1981 tale of a haunted house, a deranged monster man and what may be the worst voice acting ever committed to celluloid. The House by the Cemetery is the kind of movie that deserves to be shown in the middle of the night, not because it's scary (it isn't) but because it's so gratuitous and maddening that only sleep deprivation can put you in the right mindset for the Italian bloodbath that awaits you.
