House of Clocks, The (1989)

The House of Clocks (1989)

[xrr rating=3.5/5]

The second entry in the Italian cable series ‘Houses of Doom’ is Lucio Fulci’s The House of Clocks.  When three thugs decide to rob the house of an elderly couple and become trapped, they soon learn that the house has the ability to revert time.  And with the rewind of time comes the family secrets and more than one skeleton in the closet.

Compared to the previous entry in this series, The House of Clocks has a far superior story line.  In fact, the film plays like an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’.  The problem is that it’s drawn out to full feature-length.  Still the story is superb.  One of my favorite elements of the film is that you spend a good part of the film just trying to decide which group of characters is worse.  The thugs are dangerous, but the elderly couple is deceivingly deadly.

The series of twists really make this feel like ‘The Twilight Zone’.  And though it is slow to develop, each new element adds on to the story for the better.  The gore is very well done, and certainly excessive for an 80’s cable series.  All in all, The House of Clocks is a much better film than Fulci’s other entry in ‘Houses of Doom’, and certainly one of the better of his latter career.  So although it isn’t easy to find, I recommend it to Fulci fans and Italian horror junkies alike.