House (1986) [REVIEW]

house movie poster 1986

 

What an inventive name for a horror film! House! I wonder where it takes place! Maybe a house? Maybe a location that’s not a house? Who knows, bro. This film is NOT to be confused with that guy with the cane from that TV show who I guess is kind of a dick but ends up being really helpful. I don’t know, I haven’t seen that show. We’re talking about Shasta McNasty, right? That’s the show? GUYS REMEMBER UPN?! That channel had some crazy ass shows on it. This film also shouldn’t be confused with the Japanese film Hausu, which is crazy as shit. In fact, it was SO crazy that I remember once making a joke on the internet (would you believe it?) about that movie being SO crazy that it should be admitted into the Criterion Collection. Little did I know that it’s actually got a reputation of being pretty crazy and the people at Criterion had already accepted it and released it. Shows what the fuck I know. Wait, what movie did I watch? Oh that’s right, something that I used to kill time because it was on Netflix Instant. AND I ONLY JUST NOW REALIZED THAT THE TAG LINE IS “DING DONG, YOU’RE DEAD”. HAHAHAHA, THAT FUCKING RULES.

 

house movie 1986 william katt

Ian Ziering, is that you!?

Luckily for Vietnam War veteran Roger Cobb (William Katt), he’s been able to cope with his post traumatic stress by turning his experiences into books. When his aunt is found to have committed suicide, Roger inherits her house, which is the house where he had previously lived in with his wife and son. Sadly, his son died in the swimming pool one day, and he and his wife got a divorce, so you’d think that he’d want to get rid of the house immediately. While walking around the place, he has powerful memories of the events that have taken place there and he decides to stick around for a while. After being there for a little while, Roger decides to use this time to focus on a new book about his experiences in Vietnam. While writing, he not only experiences flashbacks of some of the terrible things he had done while in Vietnam, as well as visions of terrible creatures living in the house.  Roger is then approached by a pretty neighbor lady who asks for his help babysitting her son, who is around the age that his son was when he drowned in a pool. The babysitting experiences seem to make both flashbacks and monsters in the house more active, and in order to save this little boy, Roger is going to have to confront his inner demons, which are manifested as outer demons! Is that a thing? Outer demons? I don’t know, but he does it and saves the little boy and blows up the demons or whatever the fuck they were. Good job!

 

house movie 1986 vietnam ghost zombie iron maiden

Oh shit, it’s the fucking trooper! Run to the hiiiiilllllllllllllsssssssssss!!!!!!!!!

Not really a horror movie, was it? You guys were fooled! This is actually more of a comedy along the line of Cemetery Man or Dead Alive or something than it was horrific. The only problem is it wasn’t really THAT funny. The 80’s had a lot of movies like this, didn’t they? Shit like Night of the Comet or Night of the Creeps where the setup of the movie is for a horror film but the dialogue and events that play out are far more comedic. That’s good for them, but it’s not really my thing. I can do something like Monster Squad, but other than that, I generally prefer that stuff to be one or the other. GUYS DOES THAT MAKE ME A DICKHEAD?! I don’t know, the film started off with a relatively serious tone, and I thought it was an interesting idea to play out some sort of Jacob’s Ladder-esque psychological thriller, but veered off the rails into shitty creature makeup pretty fucking quickly. I guess there could be some nostalgic charm for people who grew up on this movie and the wackiness of it all, but watching it as a grownup dude who just kind of randomly stumbled across it, I wasn’t really impressed. Multiple times you could see the masks of the monsters or whatever shifting around to see the actor’s eyes underneath and the final confrontation was with something that looked like he stepped off of an Iron Maiden album cover. Don’t get me wrong, Iron Maiden is awesome, but their mascot Eddie isn’t really all that scary. GUYS I DIDN’T LIKE THIS BUT MAYBE YOU GREW UP ON IT OR WHATEVER SO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.

 

Wolfman Moon Scale

one quarter moon

IMDb
Netflix
Amazon DVD

6 responses to “House (1986) [REVIEW]

  1. Nailed it. Pretty blah film all around, I’m afraid. I appreciate the idea, but I got really bored. Don’t think I even finished it.

  2. As someone that actually watched this movie in the 80s I couldn’t disagree with this review more. If you dont appreciate 80s horror for what it was don’t review anything pre 90s.

  3. Heh, I’m one of the 80s kids who watched this movie many, many times and thought it was great. Even so, I agree with you–it really doesn’t hold up for adult-me. But I feel like everyone can appreciate that BULL FROM NIGHT COURT was in this. That is outrageous!

    (And yes, Hausu was insane.)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s