I watched this movie with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scioscribe in September, and it now feels like a half-remembered fever dream. I am pretty sure it felt like that even while I was watching it.
House is an utterly batshit horror-comedy-I don't even know what from the 80s, and is so totally insane that it achieves some effects which are hard for actual good movies to create, such as unpredictability and making the viewers genuinely uncertain what is real and what isn't. I am not sure that any of those effects were intended.
It starts out conventionally, with a writer, Roger, signing books for a rather peculiar assortment of fans. He calls up his ex-wife and is awkward. He's blocked on his book so he decides to move. So far, so ordinary.
A realtor shows him a house with a pool. Roger sees a boy drowning in it! He runs and dives in to rescue him! The boy vanishes, leaving Roger thrashing alone in the pool! Then it cuts back to the real estate agent, who goes on with the conversation. This was very weirdly edited, leaving me uncertain whether it was a memory or a hallucination or whether it really happened but the realtor was under a spell and didn't notice or WHAT.
The whole movie is like this.
The house has a giant swordfish nailed to the wall.
We then get a flashback or dream sequence or memory (etc) of Roger's time as a soldier in the Vietnam war. He has a buddy who looks exactly like the Punisher from the comic books, and talks and acts like a GI Joe toy soldier in an eight-year-old's game of Vietnam war via osmosis from whatever bits of media he saw before his parents turned off the TV.
Then an extremely bizarre ghost or apparition or monster or SOMETHING appears, a purple woman with fish lips. I was totally uncertain whether it was 1) real, 2) solid, 3) when any of this was happening. The editing in this movie was generally extremely confusing about things like that.
Roger chops it up and buries the wriggling pieces so I GUESS it was real and solid.
Incoherent spoilers.
At some point in here we learn that this is actually Roger's old home or the home of a relative where HIS YOUNG SON DISAPPEARED AND THAT'S WHY HE'S NOW DIVORCED. I feel like perhaps we should have gotten this info earlier.
The swordfish on the wall comes to life.
A bunch of tools attack him or possibly defend him.
His dead Vietnam buddy appears and attacks him.
I forgot to mention that there's a major subplot involving a comic nosy neighbor, who eventually gets recruited to fire a spear gun at Cthulu.
A woman comes in and turns into a monster. Roger kills her. Then she turns back into a woman. This is played like he just hallucinated that she was a monster, and had murdered some innocent woman! With total nonchalance, he stuffs the body in a closet. Later her body vanishes, so... maybe the whole thing was a haunting?
A different neighbor, a woman, wanders in, tells Roger he needs to babysit her young son in his house AND GIVE HIM A BATH, and then leaves. I found this harder to believe than literally anything else in the movie.
The son ends up running around the house naked and screaming. It's because he's being attacked by demon hands but my eyebrows pretty much hit the ceiling.
The Vietnam buddy returns as a zombie with a machine gun and grenades.
Roger opens the bathroom medicine cabinet and climbs a rope into a vast void. At this point in the movie, I'm still not sure if this entire thing is happening because the house is haunted, or if he's imagining the entire thing because he's metaphorically haunted by Vietnam, or what. And so while I didn't predict that a skeleton pterodactyl would grab his gun and shoot the rope and he'd land in Vietnam, if while he was falling through the pterodactyl-infested void, you'd asked me to guess where he'd land, I would have guessed Vietnam.
Roger, who does indeed land in Vietnam (I mean, the "Vietnam" that exists in his head/the house/Demon World), finds his missing son in a cage, kills his zombie Vietnam buddy, sets the house on fire, and runs out with his son. The end!
No idea what happened when he had to explain any of this: the sudden return of his son who'd been missing for a year and is plenty old enough to describe what happened, his neighbor's son running naked and shrieking through his house, his house burning to the ground, or the woman he murdered and stuffed in a closet. If she existed at all. It's hard to say.
This movie has three sequels. It is an actual franchise. I am absolutely boggled by this.
Have any of you ever seen this? Or know what the director was smoking?
scioscribe in September, and it now feels like a half-remembered fever dream. I am pretty sure it felt like that even while I was watching it.House is an utterly batshit horror-comedy-I don't even know what from the 80s, and is so totally insane that it achieves some effects which are hard for actual good movies to create, such as unpredictability and making the viewers genuinely uncertain what is real and what isn't. I am not sure that any of those effects were intended.
It starts out conventionally, with a writer, Roger, signing books for a rather peculiar assortment of fans. He calls up his ex-wife and is awkward. He's blocked on his book so he decides to move. So far, so ordinary.
A realtor shows him a house with a pool. Roger sees a boy drowning in it! He runs and dives in to rescue him! The boy vanishes, leaving Roger thrashing alone in the pool! Then it cuts back to the real estate agent, who goes on with the conversation. This was very weirdly edited, leaving me uncertain whether it was a memory or a hallucination or whether it really happened but the realtor was under a spell and didn't notice or WHAT.
The whole movie is like this.
The house has a giant swordfish nailed to the wall.
We then get a flashback or dream sequence or memory (etc) of Roger's time as a soldier in the Vietnam war. He has a buddy who looks exactly like the Punisher from the comic books, and talks and acts like a GI Joe toy soldier in an eight-year-old's game of Vietnam war via osmosis from whatever bits of media he saw before his parents turned off the TV.
Then an extremely bizarre ghost or apparition or monster or SOMETHING appears, a purple woman with fish lips. I was totally uncertain whether it was 1) real, 2) solid, 3) when any of this was happening. The editing in this movie was generally extremely confusing about things like that.
Roger chops it up and buries the wriggling pieces so I GUESS it was real and solid.
Incoherent spoilers.
At some point in here we learn that this is actually Roger's old home or the home of a relative where HIS YOUNG SON DISAPPEARED AND THAT'S WHY HE'S NOW DIVORCED. I feel like perhaps we should have gotten this info earlier.
The swordfish on the wall comes to life.
A bunch of tools attack him or possibly defend him.
His dead Vietnam buddy appears and attacks him.
I forgot to mention that there's a major subplot involving a comic nosy neighbor, who eventually gets recruited to fire a spear gun at Cthulu.
A woman comes in and turns into a monster. Roger kills her. Then she turns back into a woman. This is played like he just hallucinated that she was a monster, and had murdered some innocent woman! With total nonchalance, he stuffs the body in a closet. Later her body vanishes, so... maybe the whole thing was a haunting?
A different neighbor, a woman, wanders in, tells Roger he needs to babysit her young son in his house AND GIVE HIM A BATH, and then leaves. I found this harder to believe than literally anything else in the movie.
The son ends up running around the house naked and screaming. It's because he's being attacked by demon hands but my eyebrows pretty much hit the ceiling.
The Vietnam buddy returns as a zombie with a machine gun and grenades.
Roger opens the bathroom medicine cabinet and climbs a rope into a vast void. At this point in the movie, I'm still not sure if this entire thing is happening because the house is haunted, or if he's imagining the entire thing because he's metaphorically haunted by Vietnam, or what. And so while I didn't predict that a skeleton pterodactyl would grab his gun and shoot the rope and he'd land in Vietnam, if while he was falling through the pterodactyl-infested void, you'd asked me to guess where he'd land, I would have guessed Vietnam.
Roger, who does indeed land in Vietnam (I mean, the "Vietnam" that exists in his head/the house/Demon World), finds his missing son in a cage, kills his zombie Vietnam buddy, sets the house on fire, and runs out with his son. The end!
No idea what happened when he had to explain any of this: the sudden return of his son who'd been missing for a year and is plenty old enough to describe what happened, his neighbor's son running naked and shrieking through his house, his house burning to the ground, or the woman he murdered and stuffed in a closet. If she existed at all. It's hard to say.
This movie has three sequels. It is an actual franchise. I am absolutely boggled by this.
Have any of you ever seen this? Or know what the director was smoking?
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I haven't seen it in awhile, so I can't speak to specifics. But I loved it back in the day and watched it several times.
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Whether or not this is actually true.
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The '80s were honestly the time that I started getting away from horror, and kept slowly moving away from it so that nowadays I don't watch much of it at all. (Not to mention that the antidepressants I used for a while after my sister died gave me terrifying aural hallucinations that someone was in my house, talking, or would wake me thinking some man was talking to me next to my bed, so horror became a complete no-go for me at that point. I've been really selective about what I'll watch now. But part of me is almost tempted to try to watch this again just for the sheer batshit march down memory lane.)
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Until I saw the identifier of the '80's, I thought you were talking about Obayashi's House/Hausu (1977), in which context this description also made sense. A stuffed swordfish probably would come to life in that movie, too.
I forgot to mention that there's a major subplot involving a comic nosy neighbor, who eventually gets recruited to fire a spear gun at Cthulu.
Does it work?
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So did I! And I came into the post all ready to drop some trivia about that movie I learned a few weeks ago when a podcast I listen to did a patron-only special episode on that version, only to be stymied. XD
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The director has only directed commercials previously. The studio hired him, IIRC, just to write a treatment for it (or some such pre-production task). He wanted to direct, but they hired someone else. He went to the length of using his own money to print up flyers for the movie that named him as the director, and bicycled around handing them out. The studio eventually relented and hired him.
One host of the podcast loves this movie (and he was the font of all the trivia), and said that he thought the director's commercial background fed into the editing style of the movie, since it felt like a series of 3-minute long vignettes with multiple cuts.
Also, the director wrote it, and he said he didn't know what would scare young girls, so he asked his 9-year-old daughter what she was scared of and just wrote that in, which means you get surreal things like a piano lid eating someone's hands.
I don't remember anything else right now. I'll have to re-listen to the podcast. XD If anyone is interested in listening to it, it's I Don't Even Own a Television, at the $5/month level to access the bonus podcasts, and this one was posted to Patreon on November 29 (so you could subscribe for one month, listen to this one, and then unsub).
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Among other things, I was amused by both the cut-tag label "incoherent spoilers" and the "genre: implausible plots" tag.
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:)