At 110 minutes, The House With Laughing Windows is an interminably long giallo almost completely lacking in the elements that usually make the genre entertaining. I'm not just talking about graphic violence and nudity. Forget that stuff. I'm talking about things like style, atmosphere, suspense, action, intrigue. Instead, this film is 90% flatly photographed scenes of a guy walking around town slowly uncovering a not very interesting mystery, while few people die and he never really seems to be in any real danger until the end. I watched a few seriously uneventful movies in October, but this might have been the worst.
The House With Laughing Windows seems to have something of a (minor) cult following, and I think that mainly stems from the last ten minutes or so, when something finally (FINALLY!) happens. The ending is... weird, to say the least, and I'll give it credit for that. I'm just not so sure it's good weird. The solution to the mystery doesn't make a damn lick of sense, and it too abruptly shifts from blandness to weirdness that it lacks the nightmarish feeling I suspect the filmmakers were aiming for.
Rating: D
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