For Thanksgiving, sitting home alone as per CDC recommendations, I opted to find a movie for the night and wanted something that was somewhat light, probably a genre flick of some kind, that wouldn’t take up my whole night since I also have papers to grade this long weekend.
Then I found the 1986 horror-comedy House was included on Amazon Prime, and we had a winner! Or we might. I need to see how good the movie is, after all.
Vietnam vet and bestselling author Roger Cobb (William Katt) moves back into his aunt’s house after the old lady seems to have killed herself. After his parents’ death, Roger’s aunt more or less raised the boy and he grew up in this house. However, as an adult, his own young son vanished without a trace during a visit. He’d last seen the boy seemingly drowning in the backyard pool, but when he jumped in, young Jimmy Cobb was nowhere to be seen. The boy’s disappearance, Roger’s insistence that the boy was still on the grounds, and his aunt’s insistence that the house was haunted cost Roger his marriage, and he’s been in a somewhat dark place ever since.
That said, moving back into the house of his childhood is bringing its own problems. Roger wants solitude to finish a novel about his time in Vietnam, particularly focusing on a friend who never came back, one Big Ben (Richard Moll). Roger’s behavior is enough to bother his busybody neighbor Harold (George Wendt), but what else is a man to do when garden tools go flying across rooms, visions of his ex-wife turn into overweight ghouls, and a stuffed marlin on the wall suddenly seems to come to life? It’s not long before Roger is again wearing his old fatigues and trying to finish his book, survive his house, and get his son back.
Apparently, director Sean S. Cunningham and director Steve Miner, both veterans of the Friday the 13th series, wanted to do something more comedic, and that certainly fits the bill with House. This isn’t a horror movie to take all that seriously. Many of the monsters and ghouls look more silly than dangerous, and the movie seems to have something like sitcom lighting. There’s a long segment where Roger finds himself babysitting neighbor’s toddler, and the boy almost gets sucked away by some mini-monsters through a chimney. Wendt is a good comedic actor, and it is a nice change of pace to make the busybody neighbor in an 80s comedy be a man instead of a woman, but I can’t say I found the movie all that funny.
And then Big Ben’s undead form comes stomping in and the movie goes for a more exciting conclusion where Moll can practice what will be his Two-Face voice. Again, this movie isn’t very scary or funny, but it is more funny than scary. I never worried for a second for the life of Roger or anything else for that matter. The monsters weren’t all that bad to look at, and Roger even figures out how to play some against each other. It wasn’t terrible or anything, but it likewise wasn’t anything I’d ever go out of my way to see again.
Grade: C
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