House

I remember as a kid when this movie came out. Seeing the poster of the dead ghoul hand ringing the doorbell thinking this shit was going to be scary. Looks can be deceiving. Let’s just says the actually movie was not the type of freight I was expecting.

William Katt from the Greatest American Hero is in it. Something I did not know as a kid but if I did that would have lesson my fear of the poster. Sure, he’s an actor and he probably took the role in this “horror film” in order to change his image, and I say it worked. He looked less goofy in comparison to his role as high school teacher turned reluctant superhero in one of my fav childhood shows. Katt got to look a little more sexier than the world best knows him, but despite the more adult look with Katt in the movie House still had the stigma of being lighthearted, a stigma it so deserves

It’s not all Katt’s fault. George Witt who plays Norm Peterson on Cheers is in the movie as well. Doubtful he was trying to change his image because in the film he basically plays Norm Peterson…only sober. Curious if people in the 80s saw that Norm was going to be in a horror movie and decided I wanted to see it in hopes that the monster pumps him filled with beer until he explodes (That’s the kinda death the devil would give you in hell).

House was a very light horror film in comparisons to others. That is saying much about a horror film in the 1980s, cause a lot of movies during that period had horror elements in it (That seem to be the fad). Some of these movies were other genres that covered themselves in horror like a piece of bread (Ghostbusters, comes to mind being one of the greatest of these horror sandwiches). House’s horror was trying to be a horror film, just not in the way he expect.

William Katt plays Roger Cobb, a writer whose child went missing not too long ago, which broke up his marriage and when his aunt leaves him his childhood home, the place seems to be driving him crazy. Though technically it could all be in his head given everything he is going through, but as it turned out the house is actually possessed (by what seems to be god awful monster costumes). Adding to the horror factor is the fact that this guy is haunted by his time in the Vietnam war where he was stationed with Night Court’s Richard Moll.

It’s not a crime for a movie not to know what genre it wants to be in but this film seemed to picked the wrong cast if they really wanted to get a scare out of me. William Katt as Roger Cobb was convincing as a troubled man dealing with his failed miraged and lost of a child but I was not convinced of the effects the Vietnam war had on him, which is bad cause the movie  revolved around him so much that we had to be convinced and he could not do it. perhaps too soon after the greatest American hero?

Anyway, I don’t want to drag this movie all the way in the mud. The monster movie could have been better but that poster as a child gave me chills than this more adult oriented Goosebumps tale did not deliver. Good advertisement I guess.