BOARDINGHOUSE (1982)
aka Housegeist
Article 3870 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-10-2012
Posting Date: 3-19-2012
Directed by John Wintergate
Featuring John Wintergate, Kalassu, Lindsay Freeman
Country: USA
What it is: A bloody mess

A playboy decides to rent out rooms in a house he owns to beautiful women so he can have his own harem. However, the house has an evil history, and people start dying once again…

I first became familiar with this movie via ads for it on several Paragon home video VHS packages, which make the movie look relentlessly bloody, but I suspect that the ad would be all that a gorehound might need, as I think it probably contains almost all the gore in the movie. Yeah, there’s some nudity for anyone looking for that sort of thing, too. But the movie as a whole is a train wreck; despite the fact that it has some interesting ideas (such as the fact that the gore attacks often involve telekinesis), most of the movie seems to be either written or edited at random, and though the movie does set up its premise and has a resolution, there’s an enormous black hole in the center full of pointless scenes, unpursued ideas, unnecessary characters, and filler. It also has a gimmick called Terrorvision; whenever you see a certain image or hear a certain sound, you can cover your eyes if you want to miss the gory parts; however, if you’ve seen the aforementioned ad, it’s already too late for that. All in all, it’s an awful movie, albeit one that did have the seeds of a much better movie contained within it.