NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

homecoming8 Italian director Lucio Fulci is best known for his extreme cult movies like "Zombi", "City Of The Living Dead", "The Beyond", "House By The Cemetery" and "The New York Ripper". Those were the late 70's and the early '80's. After that, a good movie was no longer guaranteed.I recently tracked down a couple of his movies I never even heard of. 1972's "Don't Torture A Duckling" was a surprisingly well done classic. I loved it. Since I never saw it, I was afraid it would be dull and outdated. I was wrong. I also saw 1988's "Touch Of Death" which was certainly OK. "Sodoma's Ghost" was from the same year but it's anything but OK. It starts of with a dull and laughable "nazi-orgy". After decades, 6 young people stay in that same house and are visited by ghosts from the notorious past. The dialog is cheesy, the actors are unconvincing and the story is really boring. It feels like time is standing still, really hard to watch without using the flash forward button. There are boobs around every ten minutes but even that won't help you not to fall asleep. No idea why Fulci directed it, there are a couple of special effects at the end that are (hardly) worth watching 75 minutes of this mess. In conclusion: it's more a (rated PG13) soft-sex haunting-house parody than a horror movie. If you want a decent movie Lucio Fulci made around that time, watch "Touch Of Death" or the better "Nightmare Concert".

BA_Harrison During the 'golden age' of Italian gore films (the late 70s–early 80s), director Lucio Fulci was at the top of his game, delivering extreme doses of graphic violence that more or less compensated for his less-than-stellar story lines. By the mid 80s however, the master of outrageous splatter was on something of a downward slide: his Flashdance-inspired giallo Murderock (1984) left fans dissatisfied due to its lack of creative killing; Aenigma (1987), a supernatural revenge tale inspired by De Palma's Carrie, suffered from an awful script that offered several laughable death scenes (including a ridiculous snail attack!); and A Touch of Death (1988), although very gory, proved almost unwatchable thanks to an incomprehensible plot and a few heavy-handed attempts at comedy.However, worse was still to come: 1988 also saw the release of Fulci's The Ghosts of Sodom, a very weak ghost story that relied heavily on stale genre clichés, used copious amounts of nudity and softcore sex to try and detract from its awful acting and lousy dialogue, and which totally failed to dish out the carnage.The film opens in a remote French villa during WW2, where a Nazi orgy ends with a bang (literally) when the place suffers a direct hit from an air raid. The action then cuts to the present day, and follows six travellers en route to Paris who stumble upon the (strangely intact) villa after taking a shortcut (I said this movie was clichéd, didn't I?). After opting to spend the night in the old building (which, to their surprise, is fully furnished, has electricity, and offers a great selection of vintage wine in its cellar), the group suffer from a series of terrifying supernatural occurrences that tests their friendship and pushes them to the edge of sanity...In the right hands (or should that be 'wrong hands'), this tale of debauched sex, ghostly prostitutes, and repressed lesbianism (one of the girls is a closet rug-muncher) could have been a slice of exploitation heaven; Fulci, unfortunately, fumbles the ball, and manages to make his salacious subject matter seem incredibly dull: his sex scenes are not nearly sleazy enough and the horror simply lacks guts. After 85 minutes of mind-numbingly naff Nazi nonsense and ghostly guff, Fulci ends his film with an insipid cop-out finalé, which sees all six friends (even the supposedly dead ones!) escaping with their lives from the (now ruined) building.Possibly the least entertaining horror film by the director (I still have a few more to watch, but I can't see how they could be any worse), The Ghosts of Sodom is definitely one to avoid.

Snake-666 In an all-too-familiar scenario, a group of teenagers traveling in Europe discover an isolated villa and choose to stay there overnight, unaware of the mansion's dark, war-time past. Italian filmmaker, Lucio Fulci, ventures into the realms of Nazi-exploitation with this crudely produced, yet strangely entertaining, obscure, low-budget film. 'The Ghosts of Sodom' begins in a typically sleazy manner, with a short portrayal of a drug-laden Nazi party of debauchery being filmed by one member of the party who we will soon come to know as Willy (Robert Egon). Despite the pseudo-eroticised nature of the opening segment, the sequence soon takes a rather unpleasant, repellent tone before the cut-shot quickly transports the viewer back to the present day. It is here that we are introduced to the main characters and, rather characteristic of a Fulci film, these characters remain underdeveloped throughout and seemingly have no individual personality. This is an unfortunately consistent flaw with a large number of Fulci's movies but more so with this film. Despite a few brief instances, the majority of lines in the film could have been spoken by any one of the six main characters. Sadly, this rather glaring fault is coupled with numerous instances of wholly pointless and asinine dialogue. However, this is not to say that 'The Ghosts of Sodom' is an entirely bad movie. In fact, for a production of this type, it is a rather accomplished piece of film-making. Fulci utilises a beautiful, enchanting soundtrack in a professional, productive way to create a dynamic, dramatic and foreboding atmosphere when coupled with the astonishingly gloomy, despairing and mesmerising visual elements that had become one of his trademarks. Although there are only a few gory shots to satisfy those viewers who have become accustomed to Fulci's often-excessive usage of gore, one should be able to appreciate that the erotic and supernatural elements of the film provide the fodder here. Unfortunately, the rather slow-pace and often empty, prolonged instances of tedium can certainly subtract from the viewing enjoyment and distract the viewer from appreciating the more intricate and important plot-aspects; a true concern as the story is far from enormously intricate. However, in reality, how many similar films do not suffer from these same problems? One can appreciate this film for the superb, atmospheric presentation if they are able to ignore the predictability, plot/character flaws and kitsch of the whole production. Despite the somewhat inane storyline (although adequate for the production) and often-ridiculous scripting of the movie, one can certainly waste eighty minutes on films far poorer than this. 'The Ghosts of Sodom' is quite simply Nazi-exploitation with a supernatural twist which, in places, is full of tension with the 'Russian Roulette' sequence being the absolute peak of heart-pounding suspense. Fans of Fulci's other films may be disappointed, but fans of the sub-genre may find various things to like about this film despite the movie not being as explicit as other movies of its type. My rating for 'The Ghosts of Sodom' - 6½/10.

hkchris Sure, Lucio wasn't the same in his later years. But "The Ghosts of Sodom" had potential. A few twenty-something kids get lost, they find an old house, the house was used by the Nazi's, etc... The camera work in the beginning is very dizzying. The whole thing just looks very cheap. But it's still better than most of Fulci's later films. It also has gratuitous amounts of sex and nudity. The ending is particularly bizarre. Perhaps the script was partially finished or they ran out of money. Needless to say, one character dies and is miraculously alive by the time the credits roll. This is a very hard film to summarize. Probably worth seeing once.