House

Ding Dong, you're Dead

When I was a kid, I used to watch Steve Miner's House on a regular basis. It just had this appeal to me because of it's essential ingredients that attracts me to horror. It was a haunted house movie of sorts. The film follows the adopted "the house is evil" formula where those who live within a residence slowly succumb to it's benevolent grip, feeding from their fear and anxieties, needing their lifeforce to continue to thrive. I was watching House again tonight for the umpteenth time and was reminded, for some ungodly reason, of Dan Curtis' spookfest, Burnt Offerings, in how horror novelist, Roger Cobb(William Katt)falls under the malevolent spell of the house he grew up in with batty aunt who hung herself("the house beat me"), with plenty of ghastly creatures(..something perhaps out of a Lovecraft adaptation)attempting to drive him over the edge. While Burnt Offerings hasn't much in common with House, it dealt with the house inhabitants falling prey psychologically(..and physically)to it's evil influence, unable to combat it's control.

In House, Cobb goes through a series of encounters while battling the lurking forces which wish to send him off the deep end, including a close call with police. For a period of time, Roger's new neighbor believes he's bonkers and seeks to "help" him, calling the police after Cobb blew a hole into a hideous hag monster which was impersonating his soap opera actress wife(Kay Lenz). Cobb is able to successfully avoid any trouble with them, and, in my truly favorite scene in the movie, commence to burying the beast..in pieces all throughout his yard! I just love the music applied to this scene, it somehow adds some good natured humor to such an outrageous situation, all those holes dug up in the back yard, hacked creature parts buried, and filled with earth.

Miner injects Vietnam recollections within the film(Cobb is working on an autobiography of this time in his life)to set up the slam-bag finale as Cobb contends with a zombie Richard Moll, as Big Ben, an injured soldier he was friends with in Nam. Ben carelessly left his body open to gunfire due to his fearless nature and Cobb wouldn't adhere to his commands of killing him. So Ben is carried away by the Vietnamese to be tortured and proclaims revenge. This will tie into a seperate story arc concerning Cobb's missing son, "kidnapped by the house" and this unfortunate event has left Roger a broken and tormented man. It led to his divorce and truly haunts him. It's all part of this grand design of the house to "defeat" Roger by driving him mad, and it hopes, suicide.

There are a number of gags I thoroughly enjoy that are incorporated within the film such as the really ugly monsters, the oft-used Carrie "jump scare" where we see Cobb's son playing as a hand emerges from the ground, Moll's rotted(..but gargantuan)corpse in tattered fatigues with his skeletal frame starting to show, this winged creature Cobb encounters as he descends within the "other world" to find his son(..it snatches away his shot gun, spinning it like a gunslinger before firing it off at Cobb, which kind of reminded me of Sam Raimi's nutty Army of Darkness, and I was kind of persuaded that this was perhaps a homage to Harryhausen), and that swordfish on the wall(!)as it flops around before Cobb shoots a big hole through it. I mustn't forget the scene where garden tools are chasing after Cobb, either.

The cast is a stellar one. Katt(..who effectively shows his withering mental state the longer he remains in the house, as Cobb), George Wendt(..as nosey neighbor who means well and is legitimately concerned for Cobb's well being, soon realizing himself that there unspeakable horrors within the house), Moll, of course, and Lenz(..who is stuck with a rather minor part, but is able to muster up an impression anyway)all adding a ton of wealth to the rather goofy plot.
And, lest I forget, the wonderful poster art for the movie, one of my all time favorites, this rotted hand pressing the doorbell. Quite perfectly morbid and beautifully establishes the tone of the movie the viewer will be involved in.

House is one of those movies that is near and dear to my heart because it successfully, to me, fused comedy, horror, and drama, allowing itself a freedom to toss at us off-the-wall ideas and images. It has it's share of flaws(..such as Cobb's all-too-easy rescue of his son, or the numerous escapes Cobb finds out of the "other world", not to mention his son, alive and well, just a little filthy), but they little bother me for the number of crazy, oddball anecdotes seen throughout that offset them. I will say that it seems as if the filmmakers just stockpiled a list of bizarre situations pitting some unfortunate character against the supernatural.

Katt, like Jeffrey Combs or Lance Henriksen, is part of that fraternity of B-movie actors that, despite the absence of quality in the movies he stars, I'll always watch a flick if his name is in the title. We horror fans are a loyal brood who never forget the stars we grew up watching.