In short: The Ogre (1988)

aka Demons 3: The Ogre

aka The House of the Ogre

Successful horror writer Cheryl (Virginia Bryant), her husband Tom (Paolo Malco) and their son Bobby (Patrizio) have rented a castle in Italy for some pretty special summer vacation time. Well, I say vacation, but Cheryl is so obsessed with exorcising her emotional demons via her writing, she’s still working rather a lot.

The family’s chosen vacation spot doesn’t seem to have been a great idea, either: once they have moved in, Cheryl begins having terrible nightmares and visions of a childhood encounter with a creature she identifies as an ogre. She becomes convinced these dreams are actual memories, and that the castle’s cellar is the place where she really did encounter something terrible back then. She does seem to have awakened something, for mildly strange things do start happening around her, even outside of her nightmares.

Tom, as is horror movie husbands’ wont in situations like this, is of course of little help, and acts in a way that would be less than helpful if Cheryl indeed had the sort of psychotic break he seems to suspect her to have, and is certainly not useful in case of actual monsters, even those perhaps conjured up by Cheryl’s subconscious.

The Ogre is another one of Lamberto Bava’s movies made for Italian TV. It isn’t one of the more exciting ones, going for a kind of psychological suspense with occasional monsters that neither Bava’s and Dardano Saccetti’s script nor the actors can really sustain.

Bava does seem to enjoy the opportunity to shoot in real locations for once a bit too much, so there are a lot of decidedly uncreepy shots of the very pretty castle, an much use of daylight and natural light that doesn’t play to the director’s strengths at all.

Some of the scenes of Cheryl creeping around the cellar or of the ogre doing his ogre business are fine, but the film seems more interested in the pretty castle and in Cheryl’s and Tom’s not terribly interesting rows to make much of those.

It’s all a bit harmless, and certainly lacks a scene or two of people getting killed via the power of golf.