Crew
Director – Lewis Abernathy, Screenplay – Deidre Higgins & Geoff Miller, Producer – Sean S. Cunningham, Photography – James Mathers, Music – Harry Manfredini, Photographic Effects – VCE/Peter Kuran & Geoffrey K. Hull, Animated Effects – Jim Danforth, Makeup Effects – KNB Effect Group, Production Design – Milo. Production Company – New Line Cinema.
Cast
Terri Treas (Kelly Cobb), William Katt (Roger Cobb), Scott Burkholder (Burke Cobb), Denny Dillon (Verna Klump), Melissa Clayton (Laurel Cobb), Ned Romero (Ezra), Dabbs Greer (Dad), Ned Bellamy (Lee), John Santucci (Charles), Mark Gash (Mr Grosso), Anne O’Donnel (Nurse), Paul Keith (Al Bones), Kevin Goetz (Pizza Man)
Plot
Roger Cobb is now married to Kelly and has a young daughter Laurel. He makes a visit to the old family house again. His brother Burke tries to pressure him to sell the house, but Roger refuses. Roger is then killed in a car crash. Afterwards, Kelly and Laurel move into the house. However, this serves to awaken the supernatural forces present in the house.
House (1986) was a modest hit for producer Sean S. Cunningham and director Steve Miner, who had both come from making the Friday the 13th films – Cunningham had directed the very first one Friday the 13th (1980) and Miner the first two sequels. House was a Horror Comedy take on a haunted house standard with William Katt as a PTSD-haunted Vietnam Vet moved into a house that brings to life the ghosts of his past. Cunningham went on to build on that success with a sequel House II: The Second Story (1987). Interestingly, there is no House III, at least in US release, but the Cunningham-produced The Horror Show (1989) about an executed killer returned from the dead was retitled House 3: You’re Better Off on Elm Street in international release. Cunningham subsequently returned to round the series out with House IV.
House IV is again produced by Sean S. Cunningham. The director this time is Lewis Abernathy, a Cunningham associate who wrote two of Cunningham’s films – the monster movie Deepstar Six (1989) and the subsequent alien invasion film Terminal Choice (2002). This has been the only film that Abernathy has ever directed.
House IV brings back William Katt, the star of the first House, although continuity to that film is ragged. In the original film, Katt’s Roger was married to Kay Lenz and they had a son but were separated, whereas here he is happily married to a different woman and has a daughter. In the first film, he inherits the house from his aunt and moves in, whereas here it is bequeathed to him by his father. There is also now no mention here of his past as a Vietnam Veteran or his career as a writer. This doesn’t seem to matter much as Katt only appears for a couple of scenes at the start before being killed off. The rest of the show is carried by Terri Treas as his wife, although Katt keeps turning up in various flashbacks and spectral form.
Even the whole haunted house is changed – there is no Big Ben, instead there is something that ties back to a deal made by Katt’s grandfather with the Native Americans to settle on the area of ‘a sacred brook.’ There are a few reality/illusion jumps but in the latter half the appearances of Katt’s ghost are more benevolent than sinister. Indeed, the real villains of the show are the very corporeal figures of Katt’s brother (Scott Burkholder) and his two inept henchmen.
Even the tone of the films seems to have changed. House and especially House II had more of a Horror Comedy pitch, whereas there is little here that ever goes in that direction. The one thing this film does keep is the games of reality and illusion from the original. We get various sequences with Terri Treas thinking she sees the urn of Roger’s ashes fallen and a hand emerged from them; taking a shower and finding she is covered in blood from out of the nozzle; a sequence somewhat borrowed from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) where daughter Melissa Clayton is swallowed up by her bed and Terri Treas is driven to frenziedly attack the mattress with a kitchen knife.
The most famous of these effects is the sequence that formed a large part of the film’s promotion and indeed made it to the front cover of Fangoria magazine, with a pizza with a talking face in the midst of it (a nifty KNB effect) – although aside from that the film is otherwise light on the makeup effects that featured prominently in the first two House films.
Trailer here