Don't Look in the Attic

A group of heirs to a mysterious old mansion find out that they have to live in it as part of a clause in the will or be disinherited, but they soon find out of its history of everybody whom had lived there before them having either died in weird accidents or having had killed each other.

You've seen it all before, and this one is too low-budget and slow paced to be scary, and doesn't have any real surprises in the climax. No special effects or gore to speak of, in fact the only really amusing thing about the whole film is the quality of the English dubbing, which at times is as bad as a cheap martial arts movie.

3 out of 10, pretty low in the pecking order of 80's haunted house movies.

Now, I LOVE Italian horror films. The cheesier they are, the better. However, this is not cheesy Italian. This is week-old spaghetti sauce with rotting meatballs. It is amateur hour on every level. There is no suspense, no horror, with just a few drops of blood scattered around to remind you that you are in fact watching a horror film. The "special effects" consist of the lights changing to red whenever the ghost (or whatever it was supposed to be) is around, and a string pulling bed sheets up and down. Oooh, can you feel the chills? The DVD quality is that of a VHS transfer (which actually helps the film more than hurts it). The dubbing is below even the lowest "bad Italian movie" standards and I gave it one star just because the dialogue is so hilarious! And what do we discover when she finally DOES look in the attic (in a scene that is daytime one minute and night the next)...well, I won't spoil it for anyone who really wants to see, but let's just say that it isn't very "novel"!

I usually have a high level of tolerance for inept and cheaply made horror movies from the early 80s, especially if they come out of Italy, but I honestly had to drag myself towards the end of "Don't Look in the Attic", and constantly had to battle the urge not to press the fast-forward button. What an incredible dud of a film!

The plot is senseless, incomprehensible, and - worst of all - utterly boring. Three people that are related but don't know each other inherit a mansion in which their parents died in 1955. The mansion is supposedly in Turin, but I'm guessing it's in the middle of the zoo of Turin judging by the exotic animal sounds coming from outside. The mansion also comes with an ageing butler that pops up out of nowhere. There's a whole lot of whining about ancient family curses and conversations with tombstones, but zero action. The body count is low, and the couple of death sequences are ruined by miserable editing and lousy effects (like the woman who gets run over by a car). Terrible.

Writer/director Carlo Ausino previously made "Torino Violenta", which is one of the worst Poliziotesschi flicks from the 70s but still vastly superior over this nonsense.

During a séance, a woman is warned by the spirit of her dead mother- "DON'T GO TO TURIN....DON'T GO TO THE VILLA". So what does she do? Well, naturally, she high-tails it to Turin, and heads straight for the villa. Said villa, which she and her siblings have recently inherited, is haunted by malevolent spirits who enjoy driving people nuts and turning lights red. By the time our dim-witted leading lady finally looks in the attic, you'll most likely be in a deep slumber. Who cares, though? You will miss absolutely nothing of interest, and any dream you may have will be infinitely more entertaining than this uninvolving, crudely dubbed Eurotravesty.

3.5/10

I saw the Mogul Video VHS of this. That's another one of those old 1980s distributors whose catalog I wish I had!

This movie was pretty poor. Though retitled "Don't Look in the Attic," the main admonition that is repeated in this is "Don't go to the villa." Just getting on the grounds of the villa is a bad idea. A character doesn't go into the attic until an hour into the movie, and actually should have done it earlier because of what is learned there.

The movie starts in Turin, Italy in the 1950s. Two men are fighting, and a woman is telling them the villa is making them do it. One man kills the other, then regrets it, and the woman pulls out the knife and stabs him with it. She flees the villa, and after she's left a chair moves by itself (what's the point of that?), but when in the garden a hand comes up through the ground and drags he into the earth.

From there, it's the present day, thirty years later. There's a séance that appears suddenly and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the movie. The children of the woman from the prologue are inheriting the house. The main daughter is played by the same actress who played her mother. At least one of the two men from the prologue seems to reoccur as another character too. She's haunted by some warnings not to go to the villa, but they all do, since if they do not use it, they forfeit it. People die. A lawyer who has won all his cases tries to investigate a little. The ending is pretty poor. Why was the family cursed? An unfortunately boring movie.

There's an amusing small-print disclaimer on the back of the video box that reads "The scenes depicted on this packaging may be an artist's impression and may not necessarily represent actual scenes from the film." In this case, the cover of the box is an illustration that does more or less accurately depict the aforementioned woman dragged underground scene, although there are two hands, and the woman is different. It's true, sometimes the cover art has nothing to do with the movie. I also recall seeing a reviewer who had a bad movie predictor scale, in which movies with illustrations on the cover instead of photos got at least one point for that.