In Need of Some Renovations

Yep, sometimes when you go back and watch something you liked as a kid you then realize how much it sucked. As I noted in my review of House, these were two movies that I saw on cable as a kid, doing their rotations on the movie channels, and I ended up enjoying each of them because they were weird and had cool ideas. That still holds true: there are cool ideas in these films that, in the right hands, could make for potentially awesome movies. But House was a real chore to get through and, reading what the reviews had to say, the consensus was that House II: The Second Story was much worse. I was already dreading watching the sequel.

The dread was well founded as the sequel is an abysmal chore. For all its flaws, House was at least a breezy watch. I was able to get through it in an afternoon, with only a couple of quick breaks to do some things around the house. House II: The Second Story, though, took me the better part of a week to get through. It is just such an awful movie, with a leaden pace, barely connected scenes, and plotlines that end up going nowhere. It’s the kind of film where you sit there wondering, as you watch it (because the film itself isn’t holding your attention) just how it even got made. I’d call it a house fire of a film, except a house fire would be more enjoyable to watch than this mess.

The film focuses on Jesse McLaughlin (Arye Gross). When he was but a wee babe his parents passed Jesse off to friends so they could take care of the boy. That was a smart thing to do as soon after both his mother and father were shot and killed by a mysterious gunslinger in their own home. Almost thirty years later, Jesse returns to his family’s mansion, with his girlfriend, Kate (Lar Park Lincoln), by his side. And then his friend, Charlie Coriell (Jonathan Stark), and Charlie’s girlfriend / budding performer, Lana / Puce Glitz (Amy Yasbeck), come to hang out as well in this old, creepy, weird house.

The trouble starts when Jesse goes digging into his family’s history and discovers a legend of a crystal skull. Thinking maybe his great-great-grandfather could have been buried with the skull, Jesse enlists Charlie to help him dig up the grave. They find the skull in there, but also the suddenly reanimated corpse of old Gramps (Royal Dano). Dragging Gramps home, the boys hide him in the basement. But having the skull in the house unlocks the magic of the place, and suddenly a bunch of strange people from other times, and creatures from other worlds, start showing up. Jesse will have to defend the skull from these people, and the mysterious gunslinger, if he wants to keep his newfound family alive.

It’s hard to say that there’s a core element to the story of House II: The Second Story that’s interesting enough to save this film. That’s because there really isn’t a story to this second House. The film is a barely connected collection of scenes that drags on while the characters run around, doing random things. Like some other films we’ve watched recently, House II: The Second Story is less a story than it is a “and then” narrative. This thing happens, and then this next thing happens, and then this other thing happens. But none of it actually builds to anything of consequence.

The core of the story is that a gunslinger, who used to know Gramps back in the day, is somehow still alive and wants to grab the skull to use its magic. Since the gunslinger killed Jesse’s family, naturally Gramps wants revenge. And Jesse is caught in the middle of a magical adventure between two (let’s be honest) undead old cowboys wanting to kill each other for control of the magical skull. That core isn’t bad, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the house or anything else that happens within it.

That is a key problem because the story that actually matters doesn’t connect to the setting (or the title of the film, for that matter). The point of the film is that magic enters the house and then misadventures occur. Once the skull is set down, a cave man shows up and takes the skull into a prehistoric jungle through one of the bedrooms. After Jesse and Charlie get the skull back, Aztec warriors later show up and the two guys have to go into an Aztec temple (through a hole in Charlie’s office’s wall) to get the skull back. Along the way they end up collecting a caterpillar-dog, a prehistoric bird, and a woman who was supposed to be sacrificed at the temple before they saved her. And none of this, in the end, matters at all.

Each time one of these groups steals the skull there’s no explanation for why they stole it or why they want it. It’s just an obstacle for the guys to conquer. And then, once the skull is brought back each time, the adventure they just went on is ignored, never to be mentioned again. It renders each of these sequences moot, filler to pad out the runtime without actually having any bearing on the story. They’re here because random things happened in the first House, so random things have to happen here as well, but even in the first movie many of those misadventures actually connected in some way to the story (like driving the main character mad so he questioned everything going on around him) whereas here none of it matters.

Even the sideplots raised in the film don’t matter. Jesse’s girlfriend, Kate, has a boss, John Statmen (Bill Maher), that clearly wants her for himself. When he sees a girl, Rochelle (Jayne Modean), kiss Jesse at a party (he doesn’t kiss her back), he rats Jesse out to Kate and Kate storms off, leaving Jesse. You would think that, once everything is revealed and the mysteries of the house are solved, Jesse would learn something about himself and win Kate back. But no, Kate vanishes from the film and by the next scene Jesse has forgotten she even exists. So why is she even in this film?

Or let’s discuss Rochelle. We learn that she and Jesse used to date, way back, and she’s moved into town to be near him. She tries, more than once, to pull him aside so she can (we assume) confess her love and be with him. After Kate storms off, Jesse sends Rochelle home, promising to talk to her later. But Rochelle also exits the film at this point and is never even thought about again. The film ends with Jesse leaving our timeline and going to live in the Old West (spoilers for a nearly forty year old film, and I don’t feel bad about it at all) and you have to think Rochelle is going to be very confused when the man she loves vanishes without a trace. The film doesn’t care about that, though.

On and on the film piles up crap, having the character run around and do shit without any of it actually mattering. Yes, the times where Jesse and Charlie go into a prehistoric jungle, an Aztec Temple, and an Old West town are fun, and they do have great creature effects in these sequences. But by the time the credits roll you end up realizing that none of it matters. If you excised all of those sequences, and removed Kate, Rochelle, and all their connected characters as well, what you’d be left with is Jesse and Gramps fighting against a gunslinger after bringing the skull into the house. That’s the core story… but it’s also barely fifteen minutes of the film.

House II: The Second Story is a total waste of time. Good ideas are piled onto a story that doesn’t need them, and the whole thing wanders around aimlessly for its entire runtime until suddenly resolving everything and ending in the dumbest way possible. I want to like this film because it takes big swings, but none of it sticks in any way that matters. This is a film that would have been better if focused just on the gunslinger story and nothing else. But then the house wouldn’t be needed and it wouldn’t even be a House film at all at that point. Maybe that would of have been for the best.