House Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.0

House Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 5, 2017

Note: This film is available as part of the House: Two Stories set.

There’s a virtual embarrassment of riches when it comes to films featuring haunted houses, a subgenre which goes back at least as far as such relatively early efforts as 1921’s The Haunted House, 1925’s The Monster, 1926’s The Bat, 1929’s Seven Footprints to Satan and another film entitled The Haunted House, and 1932’s now iconic The Old Dark House. It’s interesting to note that several of these early offerings blended horror with comedy, and didn’t always feature houses that were “really” haunted. More traditional horror offerings accrued with great regularity over the ensuing decades, with a barely even cursory list including such titles as The Haunting , The Amityville Horror Trilogy, Poltergeist, The Uninvited and The Others . One could probably make at least a passing case that none other than Alfred Hitchcock rejiggered certain haunted house elements for one of his most legendary films, Psycho. Perhaps unsurprisingly (and as should already be obvious, given the aforementioned list of titles), there are a ton of haunted house films with the word “house” in the actual title, including House on Haunted Hill, The Dark House (just one of several haunted house films featuring this title), The House That Screamed and Housebound. Credit writers Fred Dekker and Ethan WIley, then, with cutting to the veritable chase by naming their goofy horror comedy concoction House, several years before the Hugh Laurie series House M.D. (which often is listed without that “M.D.” appendage) kind of usurped bragging rights for the moniker. The original House became an unexpected hit, leading of course to several sequels, the first of which Arrow has collected with its progenitor in a handsomely packaged new two Blu-ray set which also includes Arrow's typically wide assortment of supplements, which in this case include not just on disc bonus material but a nice hardback book entitled The House Companion.

Perhaps in at least somewhat the same way that untold millions of people laughed uproariously at the “antics” of prisoners of war in a Nazi war camp run by idiot Germans in Hogan's Heroes, the fact that House wants to build comedy out of a writer’s post traumatic stress disorder from his Vietnam experiences shouldn’t seem that odd. And yet it is, when you get right down to it, especially when one considers that House also works in trauma courtesy of a mysteriously vanished child, a marriage on the rocks, an unexpected suicide and, just for good measure, things that go bump in the night and live in the bedroom closet (among other places). The fact that House manages to wring even one laugh out such a patently bizarre assortment of plot points is actually kind of remarkable.

William Katt portrays author Roger Cobb, a once promising horror writer who is attempting to get around a serious case of writer’s block by concentrating on his own personal horror story, his time in Vietnam. When his aunt mysteriously commits suicide, Roger returns to her home for some supposed “isolation” (despite the house being plunked down in an idyllic suburb), despite the fact that his son mysteriously vanished from the place some time earlier and has never been found. That in turn led to marital discord with his soap opera star wife Sandy Sinclair (Kay Lenz).

This would seem to be awfully overheated material for what is supposed to be a blend of horror and comedy, but rather unexpectedly House has a decent tether on tone, albeit one that has to allow for a certain amount of slack as things go from slapstick to more serious issues like death on the battlefield. Roger quickly figures out that his late Aunt’s warnings that her house has a mind of its own (so to speak) weren’t the ravings of a madwoman, and some of the film’s goofy humor springs from his attempts to deal with the mayhem that ensues once he moves in. Writer Ethan Wiley and director Steve Miner don’t really opt for any ambiguity here with regard to whether what’s going on is simply evidence of Roger’s decaying mental state. Instead, they go for more comedic gusto in documenting that the “hauntings” simply add to Roger’s already considerable list of woes.

The film suffers from a number of logical holes and its effort to tie in Roger’s Vietnam experiences with what happened to his son seems awfully “convenient”, especially when one considers according to the film’s own backstory Roger’s Aunt had been experiencing paranormal phenomena there for quite some time (was she another vet?). There are some fun if patently hokey effects on display throughout the film, including a fantastically fake looking rubber monster that kind of looks like a cross between a somewhat slimmer Jabba the Hutt and a deformed alien from the original Star Trek series. The film may in fact offer at least a few more laughs than actual scares, but it is certainly one of the weirder examples of a horror comedy hybrid simply by dint of the fact that it utilizes PTSD (whether caused by war experiences or the disappearance of a child) for some of its humor.

House Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

House is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. An insert in each keepcase provides the following information:

House and House II: The Second Story have been exclusively restored in 2K resolution for this release by Arrow Films. Both films are presented in their original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 with 2.0 and 5.1 sound.

For House, the original 35mm interpositive was scanned in 2K resolution on a pin-registered 4K Lasergraphics Director Scanner at Deluxe Burbank. Picture grading was completed on a DaVinci Resolve. Picture restoration was performed using PFClean software.

For House II: The Second Story, the original 35mm interpositive was scanned in 2K resolution on a pin-registered Northlight Scanner at Pinewood Studios. Picture grading was completed on a DaVinci Resolve. Picture restoration was performed using PFClean software.

All restoration work was completed at Pinewood Studios.

Before getting into the look of these transfers, I'd like you all to know what my idea of a personal horror film is. I'm a Blu-ray reviewer and seemingly every single cult horror release I'm supposed to review has something wrong or at least different about it. Someone's changed the color timing. Someone's mishandled foley effects or reversed the stereo imaging of the soundtrack. Someone's provided a misframed master. It's like Groundhog Day with a home video collector twist. Of course this is said (kind of) in jest, but is meant to point out that once again a cult item is receiving a home video release where the framing inexplicably shows information that shouldn't be there, including in this instance part of a crew member on the left side of the frame. Personally, I'm simply going to chalk this up to Roger's PTSD and choose to believe it's another hallucination he's experiencing, which gives a nice Pirandello-esque "meta" quality to what he's going through in the first film (again, this is said in jest, for those who don't get my admittedly odd sense of humor).

Putting aside the framing issue (which I know will be impossible for some), this transfer looks very good, though there are certain variabilities in grain structure that aren't necessarily limited to opticals or even elements like darkness. While the grain is therefore occasionally chunky looking, it resolves naturally without encountering major compression issues. The palette is generally nice looking as well, though I felt that flesh tones were just a little on the pink side (something that this transfer shares with House II). Fine detail is commendable in close-ups, which frankly is not always to the benefit of some of the practical effects, like big rubber monsters. Many of the Vietnamese sequences are kind of hazy looking, with a noticeably softer appearance that tends to mask fine detail at times. As should be expected, some of the composited effects show their age.

House Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

House features three audio options, LPCM Mono, LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. I frankly didn't hear a whale of a lot of difference between the mono and 2.0 tracks, though Harry Manfredini's fun score, which has some nice low string cues, has a nicer spread. The surround track opens up the score significantly more, while also providing occasional discrete channelization of isolated effects, especially in some of the Vietnam sequences as well as the climactic showdown. Dialogue is well rendered and prioritized on all tracks.

House Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Ding Dong, You're Dead! (1080p; 1:06:39) is a great in depth making of piece with good interviews with a number of cast and crew, including William Katt, George Wendt, Steve Miner, Ethan Wiley and Sean S. Cunningham.


• Vintage Making Of (480i; 24:07) looks like it was part of an old television series, and includes the extra excitement of trying to identify the stars seen in snippets in the opening credits montage.


• Still Gallery (1080p; 6:54) offers only an Auto Advance option.


• Trailers

  Trailer 1 (1080p; 00:59)

  Trailer 2 (1080i; 1:28)

• Teaser (1080i; 1:27)


• TV Spots (1080i; 1:31) offers three spots sourced from some pretty ragged looking video.


• Audio Commentary features Ethan Wiley, William Katt, Sean Cunningham and Steve Miner.

House Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I hadn't seen House in years when I revisited it in preparation for this review, and I have to say I was really struck this time by the pure oddity of a horror comedy built around a guy obviously suffering from probably several forms of PTSD. It's kind of ironic to hear William Katt recommending that parents break their kids in on the horror genre with something like House, especially when one considers this first film was rated R (the first sequel squeaked by with a PG-13, probably because it was overtly mostly comical). That said, there's really nothing that scary here other than the disturbing subtext. Aside from the aforementioned framing issues, the technical presentation here is very good to excellent, and as usual Arrow has assembled some great supplements.