tales from the freakboy zone…: freakboy on film: HOUSE (1985)

Friday, May 10, 2019

freakboy on film: HOUSE (1985)

"You're pissin' me off, Roger!" - Big Ben

Story by Fred Dekker

Screenplay by Ethan Wiley

Directed by Steve Miner

Memory is a tricky thing. I remembered watching HOUSE multiple times on HBO back in the day. I even remembered the movie poster, but I would've sworn the tagline was Ding Dong, You're Dead. The plot is also where my memory got tricky.

I wonder if Roger's aunt is still hanging around the house.

Parting the mists of time, aka the fog in my brain, I recalled The Greatest American Hero moving into a haunted house and being terrorized by a decaying Bull from Night Court, if he had been a soldier in Vietnam. The shocking thing is I wasn't completely wrong. I had just forgotten a lot of details.

That sweater is the real reason Roger's wife ditched him.

Roger Cobb (William Katt, with more controlled curls than in CARRIE) is an author in search of solitude so he can write his autobiographical book on the Vietnam war. Nothing says solitude more than the large house his aunt recently hung herself in. Besides dealing with his aunt's passing, Roger is also suffering through flashbacks from his time in Vietnam. Cue Richard Moll as Big Ben, (a name that wouldn't need tweaking for a porno version) who is haunting Roger's nightmares and reality. As if all of that wasn't enough, Roger is also struggling with the disappearance of his son. The latter is presumably why his marriage to a famous actress crumbled.

When bad hair happens to good ghouls.

Yeah, there's a lot of emotional baggage for Roger to unpack, but this adds to the suspense. For a 1980's horror film, it's surprisingly not a splatter fest. There are serious psychologically disturbing components to the plot. For better or for worse, depending on how you view it, crazy humor keeps the film from fully exploring these components. George Wendt as next door neighbor Norm,...um, I mean Harold, provides several of the comedic moments. Not that I'm seriously complaining because I really enjoyed filling in the filmic gaps in my tricky memory. A lot of the humor is legitimately funny, just as a lot of the horror is legitimately suspenseful.