House & House II

I was drawn to House
back in 1986 because it starred William Katt – The Greatest American Hero.
I’m one of the few people you know who needed smelling salts
when I heard that a GAH box set was coming out. (Jeeves, old boy, do
press the pre-order button!)  I’m also one of the
few people you know who watched and enjoyed House.  It is (and I don’t even think you’ll find an
argument) a piece of crap movie.

But you can’t stop watching it.  Weird, huh?
It’s like something out of They Live.

House is a
horror-comedy about a troubled Vietnam
vet and writer suffering from Wonder Boys
syndrome.  He moves into his dead aunt’s
haunted house in the hopes of finding peace so he can get his Vietnam
experience down on paper.  Tormented by
thoughts of his missing son, his divorced wife and his aunt’s suicide, he
wanders right into crazy territory as he struggles to get past the title page
of his book.  With each page he painfully
eeks out, his Vietnam
flashbacks bring him closer and closer to the brink of insanity.

But it’s not his own personal demons that’ll kill him…. It’s
his aunt’s house.  The house teases him
at first with visions of his son, playing off his guilt and fears.  But he proves strong enough to weather that
storm, so the next step is to send demons after him.

You don’t have to wait long before the movie takes a comic turn
and just stays there.  Facing down a
closet demon, Katt lapses into a proto-Bruce Campbell mode, and the scriptwriter shows nothing
but an intense desire to have as much fun as possible.  Katt quietly dons his Vietnam
fatigues, including ridiculous goggles, and sets out to defeat the house at its
own game.

Meanwhile, his next door neighbor, played by George Wendt of
Cheers fame, works hard to befriend
what he believes to be a suicidal war vet.
When Katt orders a semi-truck load of Betamax recorders and cameras to
catch the closet beast on film, Wendt decides it’s time to intervene.  But he, too, is eventually drawn into the
horrors of the House.

I’ll ruin the surprise ending because it doesn’t really
matter.  Katt experienced a weak moment
of cowardice back in Nam
and abandoned his gung-ho, psychopath buddy to the Vietcong.  His buddy, tortured and killed, has now
returned (and the script doesn’t even attempt his explain the connection with
the house) to steal Katt’s son and ruin his life.

Fortunately, Katt has worked through his grief and is more
than prepared to take on his former friend and arch nemesis in a kung-fu
shootout that puts The Matrix to
shame… Assuming you live on a planet where The
Matrix was made by a couple of 15 year olds and their mom’s digicam.

Shot on a shoestring, House
was intentionally set up to break from the horror mold of the 1980’s and
indulge a talented crew of filmmakers in their childlike desire to make a
haunted house movie.

In 1986, it was strange and unexpected.  In 2004, it’s vaguely painful and only
tolerable if you’re really drunk.  But,
for the sake of nostalgia, it hangs in there…and still provides a handful of
proper laughs.  After all, it predates Evil Dead II by a year and, you know
what, you should watch for similarities…

You get a crazed severed hand that wreaks comical
havoc.  You get the bloated bug-monster
taking the place of the beautiful model wife.
You get a house that’s trying to suck everyone into a demon dimension.  On top of that, the only way to knock out the
demons is by dismemberment.

Synchronicity?

Watch for:  Home alone
with a kid, Swedish ass, dismemberment, kung fu, shotgun fu, swordfish fu, shovel
fu, hedge clippers fu, Vietnam
flashbacks, dumb cops, punk rock girls and undead soldiers

Nacho’s Gin Rating:
Three stars.  I’m not going to
mislead you.

Now let’s hurry up and move on to the next part of my double
feature:  House II.

I want to come right out and say that it’s a great
movie.  The movie people, those snooty
horror geeks, they say avoid the sequels.
They say everything after House
is tainted love, baby.

They’re wrong.  Dead
wrong.  Let’s go ahead and paint the
picture.  House II features Arnold the Barbarian, the Undead Gramps, and
Bill: Electrician & Adventurer.  Two
20-something yahoos buy the house and find themselves forced to go through it’s
dimensional shift walls to save a virgin princess, steal a magical Aztec skull
and battle the priests, zombies and demons assigned to guard it.

With your 150 year old zombie (gun toting, cowboy) grandfather,
Bill, and your pet pterodactyl to back you up, how can you go wrong?  Oh, and the princess is handy around the
house, too!

It is worth noting that the house in House II isn’t the same one.
In fact, House II has nothing
to do with House.

House II begins
with a young couple and their child in the midst of a battle with
darkness.  They give their child away for
safekeeping, then go back inside to get gunned down by an undead cowboy.

Flash forward 25 years and the child, now grown, returns
with his spoiled, nagging, pretty wife who couldn’t act her way out of my bed.

Things are strange the first night in the house and our
hero, Jesse, gets the creeps.  And an
ironing board to the head.  But not for
long!  His drunken, good for nothing,
deadbeat friend comes crashing in with his floozy wife (Puce Glitz, grrl
rocker, and they’re after Jesse’s wife in the hopes of tying up a record contract).

But before we can go too far on that subplot, we quickly run
through some background information.
Jesse’s outlaw great-great grandfather, along with his partner, Slim
Razor (the bad guy), stole a crystal skull from an Aztec temple.  Now they’re both cursed.  But who cares about that?  Jesse and his drunken friend, Charlie, have an
idea.  That skull is worth a bundle of
cash right?  Also, it grants you
immortality.  So let’s dig up your gramps
and steal it!  Ho-ho!

How anyone can calmly – even with a slight giggle – decide
to dig up their grandfather is beyond me.
But this brand of silly comedy in the script still remains much more
cohesive (and timeless) then in the first movie.  Hey, when you throw in a grandfather who’s a
wise-cracking, hillbilly zombie looking for a good time out on the town, you
can go miles with the storyline.

There’s also the matter of smuggling Gramps around without
letting the wives know.  Now, that’s just
an excuse for slap-stick sit-com stuff.  Hey,
if that doesn’t convince you to rent this one, then how about tossing the keys
of your Alfa Spider to Gramps?
Yee-haa!  Remember your shtick,
too!  Every time you park the Alfa, you
have to knock over the same pot of flowers.
No matter who drives it.

Enter Bill Maher (yep, same one), who plays the brutal music
agent.  He’s seeking out “the Madonna of
the 80’s,” and he’s interested in Puce Glitz.
See, they can manage the sub plot well into the movie.

With girls out of the house, our boys decide to keep Gramps
company and watch cable TV.   But don’t get lazy, because our boys forget
that they had organized an elaborate Halloween masquerade party.  Now you know that’s going to lure Gramps
upstairs.  But it also lures out Arnold the Barbarian,
whose spirit is trapped in the House and is under the command of the evil Slim
Razor.

There are a few other subplots going on, but we’re also at the
halfway mark, so things start to pick up.
Drop everything, just fight the bad guy and get the skull.  Charlie busts open the trunk of the Alfa and
gets his machine gun.  Time to rock and
roll, kids!  Of course, machine guns
aren’t much good when your upstairs bedroom turns into the Land Before Time.

What makes House II
one of my favorite movies is Bill the Electrician & Adventurer.  With Star Trek equipment, a natural
clumsiness, the best lines of any B movie script and a mastery of the sword,
Bill should be an inspiration for the struggling geek in you.  He shows up an hour into the film so, by
then, you’re good and wasted.  That makes
Bill about ten times better.  You’ll end
your evening talking like him to all the sober people in the room.  “Yep, yep.
Looks like you got some kind of alternate universe in there or
something.”  The sober people should be
laughing, too.

And every hero deserves an Aztec princess who makes a wicked
salad.

House II was
written by the same writer as the first movie.
The hope was to have an “anthology of haunted house movies” that were
all, basically, unrelated.  Unfortunately,
the studios would rise up from their nests after the strange, wacky
script.  They not only shit on the idea
and fired everyone involved behind the scenes, they changed the title of the
third movie at the last minute….to House
IV.  A European movie had taken the
name “House 3” several years earlier so, to cut down on confusion, the studio
decided to release House III as House IV.  See?
No confusion there.

While William Katt returned for House IV, it was a traditional sequel and, unfortunately, didn’t
capture the same comic attitude.  In
fact, let’s just say it doesn’t exist.
That would be best.

House II edges
into my do not miss category.  Unlike the
first movie, it still holds up well in the fast-evolving (or devolving?) world
of horror.  It’s fun, quirky, stupid and
worth a night with a bottle of vodka and a couple of friends.  Dust off the basement sofa, smoke up, pour
the Stoli, slam that tape into your Betamax and…um…oh, well…and get these
movies in you.  The first so you can
pretend to be an expert the second so you can add to your pantheon of movie
quotes when you hit the office on Monday.

Watch out for:
Underwear dancing, nipples, dinosaur comedy, baby slime dogs, virgin
princesses, sword battles, electrician lessons, gunfights at the OK Corral,
trigger happy cops, deux ex machinas out the yin-yang, a twisted dinner party,
satanic horses and barbarians.

Nacho’s Gin Rating:  “Hey,
you look good for a 170 year old zombie, Gramps!  You look great!”  Four stars, which is also the overall rating
for this double feature review.