Week of Reel Whorror!: Who Wants a Clean House?! - Day 1

As Carol Anne would say, They're here. While I've been a complete blog slacker most of this year, there was no way in hell I'd let Halloween go by without resurrecting my Week of Reel Whorror!. For those savvy horror fans, I have no doubt you've deduced this year's theme is houses!. If it's gloomy and creaks or is home to a family of freaks, for the next seven days we'll be taking up residence. If it's got a roof, four walls, and a door that's keeping otherworldly denizens at bay, we'll be part of the group of idiots dumb enough to snoop around.

ENTER... IF YOU DARE!!! 

House

Release: 02.28.86
Rated R
1 hour, 33 minutes

Matinee

Roger Cobb’s (William Katt) writing career and marriage falls apart after his son mysteriously vanishes from the house of his Aunt Elizabeth (Susan French). After his aunt’s passing, Roger moves into her house and starts penning his latest project, his Vietnam War autobiography, hoping the book will end his terrible wartime flashbacks of his buddy, Big Ben (Richard Moll). However, the house, always thought to be haunted, has plans of its own for the tortured writer.

Billed as a horror-comedy, House is successful at satisfying both descriptors with jump scares, outlandish monsters, and riotous dialogue delivered with deadpan seriousness. William Katt, portraying Roger at first as a tired, suffering writer turns him quickly down the path of full blown looney tunes once the house intimidates him with self-propelled hand tools, flopping fish mounts, and grotesque harbingers. The nervous wreck that Roger becomes is at his most hilarious when he simultaneously flirts with his sexy neighbor and keeps a bloated zombie from wriggling out from under a tarp. The role is also quite physical for Katt; he’s tossed down stairs, into pools of water, and dragged around for a substantial chunk of the story.

Pairing Katt with George Wendt is pure genius. Wendt, who plays Roger’s neighbor Harold, has the role of oblivious neighbor down to a tee. His delivery of the line, “solitude’s always better with someone else around,” still has me cracking up as does his reaction to Cujo, the raccoon. As Big Ben, Richard Moll gets to chew up the scenery by playing crazy with a capital K and shooting up most of the sets.

Following the plot of House isn’t quite as enjoyable. While it’s clear the house is haunted, the supernatural logistics of the house are somewhat at odds with the overarching premise. Sorry if that’s too vague, but I don’t want to give too much away in case you still haven’t had a chance in the last twenty-six years to watch it. All I can say is, House is just further proof of how good the drugs were in the 80s.

Sometimes shocking, sometimes confusing, and sometimes just plain weird, House is entirely entertaining. If you have been putting off viewing it, queue it up before its thirtieth anniversary for a good laugh.

Cheesy Times at Slaughter High

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brought to you by Stacie Ponder of FINAL GIRL.

***

Slaughter High


Release: 11.14.86
DVD Release: 04.14.09
Rated R
1 hour, 30 minutes


A Netflix Night



Today is Marty Rantzen's (Simon Scuddamore) lucky day, or so he thinks. Carol Manning (Caroline Munro, The Spy Who Loved Me), the hottest chick in high school, has a waterslide between her thighs and she's looking for Marty to dive in head first... if you get my meaning. She lures him into the showers of the girls' locker room for the water sports to begin. But wait, Marty! Isn't today April Fool's Day? Had he remembered that, he would have realized Carol's clique snuck in with the school's audio-visual equipment to prank him, not to film their own version of Deep Throat. They film his flaccid noodle and give him kegstand swirlies until the coach breaks up the mischief.

As if his birthday couldn't get any worse, the ring leader, Skip (Carmine Inannaccone), tampers with Marty's science project, which explodes. Marty is trapped in a burning room, a bottle of acid explodes in his face, and he melts his hands to a scalding graduated cylinder. I thought having my twelfth birthday party at Putt-Putt rained out was crappy, but this was one seriously fucked birthday!

Ten years later, the eight pranksters are invited to their ten-year high school reunion. It's wild because they've barely aged a day since high school! The event's being hosted at the old school, which has been boarded up for years. They sit around until nightfall trying to figure out where the rest of their graduating class is. With a shrug and a laugh, they head inside to start the real fun.

Slaughter High reminds me why it was a good idea to skip my ten-year reunion. Less than an hour into the party, someone beer bongs some acid, spilling their guts by the snack table. Next thing you know, one of the old buddies finds a functioning bathtub in the abandoned school and guess what; more acid! It seems as if the strangely absent Marty may not be absent and may actually be carrying a grudge, though the group doesn't seem to understand why. After these two gruesome-looking deaths, the rest of the group are picked off like the bitches. The killer, a creep dressed in Marty's nerd duds and Skip's old jester mask, gets bored with symbolic acid mutilations and just starts hacking and electrocuting anyone that moves while the dwindling crew search for a way out of their sealed tomb.

As ridiculous as it sounds, multiply that by two. The logic these folks employ to survive is baffling - they are high school graduates, right? Still, as preposterous as the deaths are, the ending ties everything up in a way that actually justifies most (not all) of the insanity. Skip's death actually makes less sense in the plot's context, but I found it to be the most entertaining.

If you wonder why there was never a Slaughter High 2: Class Disemboweled or Slaughter High 3: School Spirits, there are probably lots of reasons. Simon Scuddamore died shortly after this film was released, making it hard to capture his wild-eyed face on camera. Over half of the remaining actors never worked again. The fact is, this is the type of cheesy horror fare that made scanning the walls of your locally owned video store/tanning salon fun. If you're like me, the playfully morbid VHS cover was enough to excite my teenage mind more so than the content within. Those were the days.