HOUSE

HOUSE II – THE SECOND STORY and

HOUSE III – THE HORROR SHOW

Directors: Steve Miner, Ethan Wiley, James Isaac

Starring: George Wendt, Ayre Gross, Lance Henriksen

The first, and best film in the House series, is a schizophrenic movie that can’t decide between horror and humour. A horror novelist (Carrie’s William Katt) inherits a Victorian mansion, and finds that it contains the gateway to another dimension. The second film features Ellen star Ayre Gross as another will beneficiary, lured to the house by the promise of hidden treasure. The third film is a sequel in name only, and is almost entirely unrelated. In it an executed criminal (Blade Runner’s Brion James) returns from the dead to stalk a cop (Millennium’s Lance Henriksen).

All three films are presented in full screen, in mediocre full-screen transfers which are fizzing with encoding artefacts, making them little better than VHS copies. The sound is Dolby Digital 2.0, but frequently distorted and brittle. The number of chapters on each disc, and their placement, seems to have been determined by how many on-set photo’s could be unearthed, and so each only has a handful. (There’s no printed list, or leaflet, so it hardly matters anyway!) The “Photo Library” is meagre, and practically worthless. Digital Entertainment is another company who jumped on the DVD bandwagon for purely opportunistic reasons, and this shows in their inept packaging and lack of care. Typical is a mistake on the House III sleeve, which credits “David Blythe” as director, and director James Isaac as one of the stars…