2hotFeature one of my absolute favorites!

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Michael_Elliott House of Lost Souls (1989) * 1/2 (out of 4)The fourth and final film in the "House" pictures that were made for Italian television (two by Lucio Fulci and two by Umberto Lenzi). This one centers on a group of friends who have to stay at a junky hotel after the road they're traveling on gets closed. It doesn't take long for strange things to begin happening and of course this leads to death.Lenzi directed THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT as well as this one and I guess the best thing you can say about this film is the fact that it's better than the other one he directed. Yeah, that's really not much of a recommendation but these two films show exactly why Italian horror was dying off. Their releases in America had already stopped and it's clear that they didn't have the budgets needed to make the type of film that fans would expect.In all honesty, the story here isn't original but at the same time I think it would have been a lot of fun had it been made in 1980 instead of 1989. I say that because earlier in the decade Lenzi would have been given a budget for special effects and I'm sure we would have gotten some classic death scenes. All of the death scenes here are poorly done or they're not even on the screen. Most of them contain very little blood and there's just nothing memorable about them.What's worse is that the characters are all annoying, the performances are rather bad and there's certainly not tension in the film. Lenzi's direction seems like he's just going through the motions as there's no style or anything else for that matter. HOUSE OF LOST SOULS is a pretty poor movie that just shows how far the genre had fallen.

Joe Ebbasi So I rang one of my bro and said to watch a film one night. We got started and pretty soon got the mood. The film has some kids camping in the hills and then one night they stop in a hotel with a creepy guy. Soon the weird things start to happen and the basement is a no-go zone. One girl is stuck in a fridge and there is an almighty bang downstairs. I must say I was pretty scared. The next day two go to the town for the police and some research. The other guys stick at the hotel and the young kid is attacked upstairs by some machines. A really horrible moment his head comes off in the washing machine. Suddenly ghosts appearing and one by one they die. Everyone gets their head lopped off. The ghosts are from the people killed in the hotel many years back. There is even a Japanese monk! The survivors are the girl with telepathy and her boyfriend. There are many really scared moments in this film and both me and bro were pretty engrossed. The gory bits were very real and pretty nasty to see. The acting was so-so but enough of it was convinced for frightened young kids. In the end some heads are exploded and the ghosts can now rest. I could recommend this film for some scares and a mad night inside with a beer or a pizza. I jumped on many times and afterwards I had some trouble sleeping that night.

zeppo-2 It's the old dark house plot again with added gore. Foolish young people take shelter in in old house or in this case, hotel and all hell then breaks loose. Not one of the most original stories in the field of horror films and sadly there is nothing really new in this made for TV movie. Other than the only known case of death by washing machine that is!Made in 1989 but looks even more dated than that, the jocks and bimbos in the American splatter films were pretty air-headed but they were always far worse and incredibly stupid in the European ones. Anyone with an ounce of sense would see what a 'con-damned' building this house was and run for the hills. These just wait around aimlessly to be picked off by the forces of evil.The sound dubbing isn't very good either and somewhat annoying as none of the voices seem to be in tune with the actors. And the small child while I guess, is supposed to be cute is just a major pain in the backside. But then again, none of the cast are sympathetic and you don't really care what happens to them. Thus it rattles onto a dull finale and disappointment. Like a lot of Spanish and Italian films in this genre, the horror effects happen for no rhyme or reason, just to try to elicit a scare. There has to be some bounds of credibility and logic in even the most dopey plots.Only for really die hard fans of the director.

rundbauchdodo This made for cable horror film tells the story of a handful of young geologists, who are unlucky enough to be forced to stay at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. What they don't know is that the hotel has been abandoned for twenty years, because the owner of the hotel had killed his family and all the guests two decades ago. Strange things begin to happen, and suddenly murders are committed...Umberto Lenzi has done a decent film here, although his other made for cable feature that year, "La Casa dei Sortilegi", is superior (both films were made for a four-part-TV-series called Houses of Doom. The other two were Lucio Fulci's "La Casa nel Tempo" and "La Dolce Casa degli Orrori" - all films were made in 1989 by the way). There is one bizarre murder scene where a kid gets decapitated by a washing machine (sic!). All in all standard fare, but quite entertaining stuff.