BLOODLUST - TRAPPED IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR

During a transport to a penitentiary, due to an accident, a group of prisoners escape taking a doctor hostage. During the escape to Canada, given the serious condition of one of the escapees, the group decides to stop at an isolated farmhouse inhabited by a family of farmers to treat the companion who is now at death's door. Unaware of the particular "habits" of the inhabitants of the farmhouse, a long and bloody nightmare without end will begin for them. "House of Blood" is one of the latest works by German director Olaf Ittenbach, whose main occupation sees him active in the field of special effects (his last collaboration dates back to the film "Bloodrayne" by Uwe Boll). Here in Italy "House of Blood" is his first film to be distributed, although this director has more than ten films to his credit, all with a strong gore connotation. Even in this film of his, a certain passion for the low-budget splatter genre is noted, which in the 1980s was launched by Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, not surprisingly one of his favorite films is "Evil Dead," a classic example of a certain independent cinema. Talking about plot and screenplay in Ittenbach's works is difficult, each of his films is a continuous and personal homage to great directors, first and foremost Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, but also to certain genre films such as the prison movie or the Italian police film, strong films and filled with explicit violence. For some, his films might be disturbing, the excessive use of special effects sometimes limits their accessibility, as in one of his most famous titles "Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead," an orgy of effects and mutilations that, if viewed with the right detachment, contain a vein of anarchic and artistically pretentious that is somewhat lost in today's films. "House of Blood" begins with a car accident, some prisoners, who survived the crash take a doctor hostage forcing him to treat one of the fugitives, the doctor will do so in an old farmhouse lost in a forest, inhabited by a strange family with particular eating habits. The premise, with heads that explode, amputations, various decapitations, and gushes of blood is the signature of Ittenbach, the viewer who is about to watch the film is immediately aware of what they will have to face, a splatter party where any excuse is good to exaggerate and transform horror into a crazy nightmare cartoon. The photography clearly refers to old American action films, the dialogues are unbelievable, so clichéd and sometimes completely nonsensical, the story that should justify the events of the film leaves one quite perplexed as well as the part where the doctor is arrested and interrogated by a commissioner played by Jurgen Prochnow, who accuses him of who knows what crime without having any proof in hand, but spouting manual-like lines that to call clichéd is a compliment. This television-like imprint continues with the choice of protagonists, all coming from the world of Serial TV, who in some cases do their job by playing stereotypical roles that are an understatement to say the least. Inserting a sort of time loop in which the group of protagonists remains trapped, continuing to relive the events infinitely complicates and exacerbates the sense of confusion in those watching the film looking for the thread that perhaps does not even exist. Defining "House of Blood" a low-budget film is an understatement, the makeup borders on the ridiculous as it is approximate, fake heads that explode like balloons and blood by the hectoliter are just some of the craziness present in the film. In conclusion, a brutal splatter film with an extremely trashy connotation, but with an undeniable "bad taste" that is not always a defect; certainly if you are looking for a story that holds up in terms of narrative coherence and well-defined characters, this is not the right film, but if you are looking for a certain nostalgia for the 1980s, this film might even entertain you, but we hope for the distribution of other titles by Ittenbach because this is perhaps the least successful.