This March, “VHS Cover Art” Month returns at Catching Up On Cinema!
Every week we'll be reviewing films with incredible cover art from the VHS era.
This week, Trevor and Kyle review Steve Miner's, House (1986)!
Produced by veteran horror producer Sean S. Cunningham, and written by a young Fred Dekker, House (1986) is a strange supernatural “horror comedy” that feels like a lame imitation of superior contemporary genre films such as Evil Dead (1981), Poltergeist (1982) and Ghostbusters (1984).
A tonal mess of a film, House features some decent makeup effects, but the editing lacks energy, and the movie sadly fails to deliver engagement in the form of chuckles or scares.
Despite all of these liabilities, House's biggest stumble comes in the form of its clumsy and half-hearted exploration of the Vietnam war and the trauma inflicted upon those that participated in that conflict.
While it is apparent that at some point in production, aspects of the script were likely meant to be using supernatural shenanigans and frequent disruptions as some form of nonliteral metaphor for the protagonist's struggle in allowing himself to confront his repressed trauma, (e.g. writing a book about the war) the execution of these elements in the finished film are confusing, underdeveloped, and often lame.
Often feeling like a hodgepodge of interesting ideas that found themselves cobbled together in exactly the wrong film, House is a cult horror-comedy that this author sadly found very little enjoyment in viewing, and will likely only remember for its decent effects work and the inherent novelty factor found in its cast of (at the time) contemporary TV stars.
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