Giallo #11: "The House with Laughing Windows" (1976)

I had a sneaking suspicion going into Pupi Avati's "The House with Laughing Windows" that it was going to be a difficult sit (a no-name director, a relatively long running-time) and my gut feeling wasn't off-base in the slightest.
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An art-conservationist arrives in a scant, rural Italian village to specifically restore a rotting fresco of Saint Sebastian, which would you believe, is a source of controversy regarding its creator (the mercurial painter Legnani) and his method regarding his work.
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As he peels off layers of neglect from the church walls, he's also revealing the true nature of a town that seems bent on scaring the living hell out of him. Although "The House with Laughing Windows" may, at first glance, appear a once-removed offspring of its more evident giallo family, the film's icky, deglamorized feel gives way to the genre's consistent characteristics of bait-and-switch tactics, dark and creaky old houses and a slim mystery that takes far too long to solve.
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And thus the problem with not only this film but many giallo in general, is that it's enslaved to formula. Thus, when the material is flaccid and malevolent and the execution is dull, the deficiencies become alarmingly, distressingly evident. (Particularly when the conclusion is as insipid and anti-climactic as it is here.)
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Nicolas Roeg's minor 70's masterwork "Don't Look Now" (a kind of giallo film in its own right) occupies similar territory as "The House with Laughing Windows," yet while the former is a blazingly splendid, tense and acutely psychological piece of work, the latter frankly reeks of savage ineptitude, in both subject and form. [D]