A little girl named Henrietta (Kristen Fougerousse) kills
her pet on her birthday. Dad tries to
punish her and gets an axe in the brain for his trouble. Then a mirror shatters in her mom’s face before
she’s stabbed in the throat.
Okay, movie, you’ve got my attention.
Twenty years later, a guy starts picking up weird messages
on his ham radio. Okay, when you bring
ham radios into the plot, you’re gonna lose me, movie. Anyway, he tracks down the signal, which naturally,
is coming from the house where the little girl Henrietta murdered her parents.
Director Umberto (Nightmare City) Lenzi gets a lot of mileage
from the scenes of Henrietta hanging out with her creepy clown doll. The clown attack scenes are reminiscent of
the ones in Poltergeist. If it was
nothing more than a ghost girl with her killer clown, it might’ve worked. However, he tosses in a lot of other subplots
(killer caretakers and zombies among them) that gum up the works. Lenzi tries for an anything goes
approach. While anything goes, nothing
really sticks.
One upshot to having a lot of unnecessary subplots and side
characters: Some bastard comes to an
untimely end every ten minutes or so. I
can’t say you’ll miss them or anything, but at least Lenzi keeps the pace
moving.
This was billed in some areas as Evil Dead 3. The only connection though is someone named
Henrietta killing people in a cellar. That,
and an exploding lightbulb I suppose.
A hitchhiker gets the best line of the movie when he says,
“Hitching’s okay, it’s the hiking part that sucks!”
AKA: Evil Dead 3.
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