HOUSE

A VIETNAM VET, TRAUMATIZED BY WAR AND THE LOSS OF HIS CHILD, HAS A HILARIOUS ADVENTURE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE

★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)

Director: Steve Miner

1986

They say that the biggest stressors in life are divorce, death, and moving, and all these happen to our hero in House within a short time frame. Don’t worry, though. Lost your child? Have a beer with comedy legend George Wendt. Your wife left you? Move into your dead aunt’s house and set up traps for the ghosts. I didn’t even mention that our protagonist is a military veteran carrying guilt from his experience in ‘Nam. The movie is part war story, part haunted house story (complete with zany puppets), and part family drama. Every time the director wants you to laugh, you don’t; when the director wants you to take a scene seriously, you laugh. If the film didn’t have schizophrenia, it wouldn’t be so entertaining. There were too many ideas and no one could cut any of them. House is a stuffed Turducken—a mistake that’s still delicious.

Even before encountering a haunted house, writer Roger Cobb (William Katt, The Greatest American Hero) has gone through an experience that would break most people. Though he’s an obvious Stephen King stand-in with a rabid fan base and lots of money, his hot actress wife divorced him and his beloved aunt hung herself in her Victorian mansion. And from unevenly edited clips, we figure out that his and his ex-wife’s young son went missing from the aunt’s property, and was never found. Roger seems to be doing pretty well, though. Katt plays his character as a gee-whiz blonde American 80s male; a man’s man impervious to the needs of women and kids. Despite losing a child, he seems more concerned about writing his war memoirs instead of focusing on the terrible events around him.

The movie starts to pick up when Roger visits his dead aunt’s house—coincidentally similar to Stephen King’s Maine residence—to oversee its sale. As he wanders the large rooms and reminisces about the good times he had there, like watching his son disappear, he decides he’s not selling. He moves in and the very first night, he is ambushed by something that looks like a Muppet built by Rob Bottin. This encounter is more cute than violent, but its the last straw for Roger’s sanity. This supernatural moment causes him to purchase lots of Betamax recorders and wait in his soldier fatigues for the next creature to pop up. When he tries to explain the hocus pocus to his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt), it doesn’t go well. Harold calls the ex-wife to come over and figure out what to do with her loony former husband.

“THE MOVIE IS PART WAR STORY, PART HAUNTED HOUSE STORY (COMPLETE WITH ZANY PUPPETS), AND PART FAMILY DRAMA.”

Katt does his due diligence playing a character with multiple personalities—Roger changes from scene to scene. He’s a coward, and then he’s a gung-ho man of war; he’s level-headed and able to carry a nice conversation, and then he’s shooting puppets and hiding them in closets. In flashbacks of Vietnam that are supposed to be visceral but feel like a farce, he’s steely and upstanding. Inside his aunt’s house, he goes from reasonable writer to loco muchacho in less than 24 hours. After the first glimpse of our closet creature, most people in real life would take some time to process what they saw. Check their medications, make sure they weren’t drunk. But our hero is instantly sure of what happened, and spends thousands of dollars in equipment to save the day.

I forgot that there’s an Adventures in Babysitting storyline in this, when Roger has a kooky caper trying to keep the evil monsters from killing his hot neighbor’s toddler. Scenes in House are cobbled together and make no sense, but you can’t look away. The movie has all the main ingredients of good-bad horror: Filmmakers put in effort, the project was sincere, the tonal rollercoaster escaped their attention. As Roger sets up a battle perimeter in the home and turns on his recorders so he gets proof of his delusions, I saw the potential for a fantastic psychological drama about the residue of war. Instead we get a spooky Fraggle Rock and fun performances by George Wendt and Richard Moll. I guess that’s not too shabby.

.

.

For more Miss Wilkes reviews, click HERE.

Nicolina Torres has never used and will never use A.I. to write or help write her stories or reviews. NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (Substack.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of her work on Substack for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.