In Need of Some Renovations

As a child I had way too much access to cable television, especially the movie channels. I admit that my sisters were a bad influence, as they were ten years older and wanted to watch whatever they wanted, so that ended up leaving me watching a lot of stuff, like horror movies, that your normal small kid probably wouldn’t have watched. I saw zombie films, vampire films, slashers, and more before my age even hit the double digits, and it fueled a lifetime love for the horror genre. It probably also gave me a warped sense of humor and enjoyment for things, on screen, others find pretty gross or awful.

A pair of films stuck with me back then not because they were good (although, when I was a young one I didn’t really have much appreciation for “good” or “bad”, so long as stuff was bright and colorful) but because they were interesting. It was the two House films I saw back then, House and House II: The Second Story, and they struck me as strange, weird, and very interesting. It was about a house that seemingly had rooms that could transport a person into other worlds, other dimensions, or through time, and that really got me. Those are also stories I like, and when you pair time travel and alternate dimensions up with horror, well you’ve hit the sweet spot for my lizard brain.

I hadn’t seen the first two House films (there’s actually four official ones, in total) since their runs on basic cable and the movie channels, but I’ve remembered bits and pieces of them ever since. So when I saw the original House was available on Amazon Prime, with the evil online retailer clearly knowing way too much about my tastes, I knew I had to give the films a spin again. And the first film was… fine. It wasn’t anywhere near as good or interesting as I remembered, with a pretty sloppy story, crap that happens for no reason, and a conclusion that really doesn’t make any sense at all. But when the film gets weird, and just goes for broke, sometimes it almost recaptures that old magic I remember.

Roger Cobb (William Katt) is a professional writer who has been dealing with his personal demons ever since his kid, Jimmy, disappeared. They were all visiting Roger’s aunt in her big, weird house, and one minute Jimmy was out in the side yard, playing, and then next he was just gone. Roger’s aunt, Elizabeth Hooper (Susan French), claims the house took Jimmy, but everyone thinks she’s senile. The cops and FBI search, but Jimmy isn’t found, and everyone has to try and move on. Everyone except Roger.

Some time later, after Roger and his wife, Sandy Sinclair (Kay Lenz), have broken up, Aunt Elizabeth hangs herself. This leaves Roger as the sole heir to her estate, house included, and he decides the best way to try and write his next book, a memoir of his time serving in Vietnam, would be to take up residence in the house, to get away from it all. But memories of Jimmy, as well as some weird occurrences in the house, have Roger doubting everything he knows, including his own sanity. Was his aunt right? Did, somehow, the house take Jimmy? The only way to find out is to search the place and see what other strange marvels show up.

House is a very strange movie. Produced by Sean S. Cunningham (who co-created the Friday the 13thOne of the most famous Slasher film franchises, the Friday the 13th series saw multiple twists and turn before finally settling on the formula everyone knows and loves: Jason Voorhees killing campers 'round Camp Crystal Lake. film series and directed the first film) and directed by Steve Miner (who directed a couple of the Friday the 13th sequels), the film comes with a long horror pedigree. You would expect something horrifying, with scares that really get to you. Instead, though, House is a horror comedy that honestly can’t figure out if it wants to be horror or comedy, to the point that it ends up being neither. It tries, but fails repeatedly, to find itself and never really does.

The initial scenes are interesting, with Roger getting settled into the house and slowly realizing there’s something more going on. He gets a vision of his Aunt, on the night she hanged herself, and it feels like she’s really communicating with him. Did he somehow travel back in time for a few seconds, or her forward for a beat? It’s never really made clear, but it certainly gives the film this strange, eerie aura that works in its favor. Its ambiance paired with storytelling, and you feel like, just maybe, this film is going somewhere.

But then it doesn’t ever really follow up that thread, instead going for weird creature designs and gross-out horror. The time travel elements are brushed aside and, repeatedly through the film, we get creatures from a fantastic dimension somehow breaking their way into our world. A demonic thing that lives in a closet, a strange, chubby, demon lady who impersonates Roger’s ex-wife, and a pair of creepy children who look like rejects from the Garbage Pail Kids, all arrive at various moments with little explanation or reason to be there. They’re shock horror, but they also look so goofy and weird that they don’t really work as horror. If they aren’t horror, though, what are they?

I think the film is trying for comedic, gross-out horror, along the lines of Evil DeadStarted as a horror cheapie to get the foot in the door for three aspiring filmmakers -- Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell -- Evil Dead grew to have a life of its own, as well as launching the "splatstick" genre of horror-comedy. films. It’s the type of comedic horror that Sam Raimi coined “splatstick”, and in the right hands it can work. Miner and Cunnigham, though, weren’t the right hands. While they had the chops to do slasher horror (although even some of the films in the Friday the 13th series aren’t that great) it feels like they get lost when they try to work into splatstick. It lacks the laughs, and the gross-out goo, that would really make it work both as offensive horror and over-the-top laughs. It’s all very dull.

And it also doesn’t really unify into the story. When the demon comes out of the closet, there’s no rhyme or reason for it. The demon doesn’t have a connection to the story, it’s just this thing haunting a closet for seemingly no reason. When the weird Garbage Pail Kids show up and try to steal away another little boy, you wonder if this is how Jimmy disappeared… except then they never show up again and have no real purpose to be there except to add in an action beat to the film. The movie throws out ideas but doesn’t do so in a cohesive manner, making everything feel random and uninteresting.

The one creature among them that kind of works is the demon lady that pretends to be Sandy. It leads Roger to fight it off, and eventually he unloads a shotgun into her, only for her to then revert back to Sandy. This works, in the moment, because you’re not sure if he actually just killed his ex-wife or not. Then the cops show up, and this leads to a tense scene of Roger trying to hide the demon body he just killed. All of that is great stuff… right up until it’s also discarded from the film and never mentioned again. The film has a real bad habit of doing that.

And this doesn’t get into the plotline about Roger’s old Vietnam buddy, Big Ben (Richard Moll), who eventually haunts him and, also, is revealed to be the real kidnapper. He has Jimmy for… reasons. What does any of this have to do with demons in the house, Aunt Elizabeth, or time travel? Almost nothing at all. It’s just one more random coincidence, another thing the film throws out just to see if it sticks, all while plodding along to a resolution where, surprise surprise (except it really isn’t), Jimmy is alive and Roger rescues him from the other dimension (which might also be set in the past, in Vietnam). It just doesn’t work.

All of this is slapped together in a ramshackle film that is trying very hard to do a lot but actually accomplishes very little. I admire what the film is going for, and I certainly think key moments are quite interesting, when taken on their own. But as a whole, House just isn’t successful. It’s creatively interesting at times but, on the whole, utterly devoid of the connective tissue to keep it rolling. It’s just not good or interesting enough to warrant revisiting it again.

So, of course, it was successful enough to warrant three more sequels of varying quality. I guess people were really in the mood for demons haunting houses back in 1985. I guess that’s good for the people that worked on this film, but that means we have many more of these weird efforts to get through. I just have to hope the later entries show more of the creativity and charm the younger me remembered. Sometimes it’s fun to go back and see films you liked as a kid. House, sadly, didn’t live up to its memories.