Ghosthouse (1988)

In 1967, a husband and wife are brutally killed in their big, old house while some spooky shenanigans are going on. Is the killer their creepy daughter, who was locked up in the basement for killing a cat? Or the creepy clown doll she has with her? Or some other unknown entity?

Twenty years later, a Bostonian named Paul picks up a strange signal with terrifying screams and creepy repeated voices on his ham radio and tracks the source to the now abandoned murder-house.

Along with his hilariously foreign girlfriend and four strangers who have come to the house, our intrepid ham operator must figure out the secret of the mysterious signals and the horrible visions they all begin to witness.

The acting in Ghosthouse is really bad. The actors are just waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can say their line. It's particularly noticeable when there's a pause when one person is "interrupting" another. The first person stops in mid-sentence for no reason. Then a pause. Then the next person says, "okay, okay, I get it..." or whatever. It's either just plain terrible, or the result of English being a second language to some of these people, or both.

Actually, this is a common occurrence in these Italian horror movies, where they do all the dialogue as in-studio ADR to prevent having to worry about positioning the mic when they're shooting. The end result is, almost always, bad dubbing and bad delivery.

However, the music and repeated voices of the strange radio signal are genuinely creepy, as are the visuals of the creepy girl and her super creepy clown doll. The kills are decent and entertainingly, cheaply gory.

Still, so much of the movie - particularly the acting and the dialogue - is just so danged silly that it taints the good parts and completely undermine any scariness the movie achieves.

Ghosthouse is a charmingly crappy movie that surprises by actually being a little bit scary. But mostly it's goofy 80s vaguely-European-masquerading-as-American schlocky fun.