Project House Rewatch: House

House

This will contain spoilers.

A few things notable from the start. 92-minute run time. That’s a pretty sweet spot for a horror film. Sean S. Cunningham and Steve Miner are involved. Links to the Friday 13^th series.

The opening is effective. The grocery boy walks through the house, only to find Mrs Hooper swinging from a rope.

The next 20 minutes are pretty slow as we get a lot of back story. Roger Cobb, horror author inherits the house. It’s also the place his son went missing. He’s divorced. He grew up in the house. We find out he’s writing a book about his experiences in Vietnam. This is important to the plot.

We get Vietnam flashbacks as he writes. They’re nothing special. In fact, it looks like they’re wandering around the outdoor store of a garden centre. We get introduced to another soldier though, Ben. This is the guy I remember.

Before this we’ve had a bit of gentle humour, stuff that would have gone over my head as a kid.

Roger spends much of this section in a chunky sweater vest. It’s quite the attire. Very distracting.

Just before the half hour mark, we get our first proper monster appearing from the closet. That’s too long to have to wait.

We then dial hard into the humour again as Roger tries to capture a picture of the monster. It’s perhaps a little too silly, given what has gone before. But actually, the farcical nature of the film starts to take over. The scene with the swordfish and the garden tools works well. More farce comes when Roger is trying to bury the body of one of the beasts, and a ridiculous scene in which he’s forced to babysit a neighbour’s kid.

I thought this might lean in to the story with his own missing kid, but he’s returned safely (after some minor incidents) so it seemed a little pointless.

The creature design is great. They went chunky, and it works.

Eventually, as Roger continues to write of his experiences in Vietnam, we learn of his guilt about leaving big Ben to be tortured.

Ben is behind the abduction of his child. He wants revenge on Roger. Ben looks great. Absolutely stellar make-up and costume work.

The very end feels like a complete cop-out. Roger tells Ben he’s not afraid of him anymore, which renders Ben powerless. If might work if the script had explored Roger’s fears and ideas of the house feeding off them in a little more depth. As it is, it doesn’t work.

It’s an odd film. Part of me enjoyed watching it again from a nostalgic perspective. I love the look of the house and the creatures. I can’t fault the acting. There are gaps in the story that let it down, and the shifting tone (PTSD segueing into farce is a bit much), and a very slow first 25 minutes make it a hard one to recommend for those with no prior history with the film. If you watched it back in the day, you might have fun revisiting it.

Revisiting my thoughts from the introduction, there was no cat dustbin scare. Must have been something else. There was a big Vietnam soldier, and he was called Ben. Well done me.