The House Where Evil Dwells

Evil has never been more ridiculous than it is during EVIL IS AS EVIL DOES Month, featuring a Mondo-style celebration of all that’s, you know … evil!

“An ancient curse has turned their lives into a nightmare of lust and revenge!”  A century ago, a samurai brutally murdered his adulterous wife and her lover before taking his own life. Now, the annoyingly All-American Fletcher family – writer Ted (Edward Albert, Galaxy of Terror), his wife Laura (Susan George, Straw Dogs), and daughter Amy – with the help of their American diplomat pal Alex (Doug McClure, The Land That Time Forgot), has found what they think is their perfect new home in Kyoto, Japan, not knowing it’s the same house where the murders occurred. When informed of their new home’s gruesome history, the family laughs off rumors that it’s haunted. But as strange events begin to escalate (including possession, demonic soup, and a wacko attack by super-sized spider crabs yelling in Japanese), the Fletchers discover that the ghosts of the 19th century samurai Shigero, his wife, and her lover are very real, and they’re hell-bent on making the family reenact the ancient murder-suicide, so that the ghostly trio can be released from the house and find new digs to haunt. Filled with sex, violence, offbeat humor and grisly decapitations (not to mention those angry screaming spider crabs), American/Japanese co-production The House Where Evil Dwells is a baffling, bizarre, “what’s happening here?” slasher/samurai/haunted house shocker with high production values and low logic levels, from the director of Motel Hell! (Dir. by Kevin Connor, 1982, USA/Japan, 82 mins., Rated R)