Director: Steve Miner
Writers: Fred Dekker, Ethan Wiley
Stars: William Katt, Kay Lenz, George Wendt
Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2OJrXMu
Synopsis
A grocery delivery boy stops by at Mrs. Hooper’s house, and he finds her hanging in the bedroom. Mr. Jones explains to nephew Roger Cobb, a writer, that “she wasn’t crazy.” He’s a horror writer who is now writing a book about his experiences in Vietnam. His agent nags him that he needs to come up with something new, and a Vietnam memoir isn’t going to be it. Still, Roger explains “it’s something I’ve just got to do.” Cobb keeps pestering the FBI about his missing son, but they have no leads. He lost his wife due to his obsession with his missing son.
He stops by Aunt Cooper’s place, which he inherited. The Realtor’s already got it listed for sale, and there’s an auction scheduled for next month. It’s a huge old house, and it’s also where his son was last seen. The old lady always said the house was haunted. He decides not to sell the old house and to move in.
Mrs. Hooper’s ghost explains to Roger that the house tricked her, and that it would trick him as well; “This house knows everything about you.” The next morning, he meets his neighbor, Roger.
He finally starts on his Vietnam book, and he starts getting PTSD flashbacks about an ambush involving his war buddy, Big Ben. He finds a monster in the closet, so then he orders a bunch of video recording equipment to catch it on film the next night. Of course, it doesn’t make a second appearance.
He starts wearing army fatigues around the house as he continues to see weird stuff. Roger dwells more and more in his Vietnam flashback, it starts to get iffy as to what is real and what might be his imagination. He sees the tools from the garden chase him around the house. He shoots his ex-wife mistakenly, believing her to be a monster. Roger pretends his gun went off accidentally when the police arrive. When he looks later, the wife’s body is gone. The witch is then killed by flying garden tools, and he buries her in the backyard.
He talks Harold into shooting a “raccoon” that lives in his closet, and he expects the monster in the closet to reappear. Instead, Roger gets pulled into the closet with it. When he stands up, he’s back in Vietnam, next to Big Ben, who has been shot with a machine gun. Ben asks Roger to kill him, but then he’s captured by the enemy instead. He wakes up and heads back to the house.
Roger finds a hole behind his bathroom mirror, and he hears Jimmy’s voice inside. Roger ties a rope to the toilet and lowers himself through the hole. He goes through a river into Vietnam and rescues Jimmy from a bamboo cage. He then encounters Big Ben’s evil skeleton, who blames Roger for weeks of torture before they killed him. They chase each other and argue for a bit, and Roger finally throws Ben off a cliff. Finally, Roger beats Ben with Ben’s own grenade after he grows some bravery. Roger, Jimmy, and his ex-wife are soon reunited for a happy ending as the house burns.
Commentary
I saw this multiple times when it came out, and I remember liking it a lot. The first 45 minutes are a lot slower than I remembered. About an hour in, it starts to get a little crazy with puppet monsters. The only serious monster is Richard Moll’s Big Ben, and although he’s pretty good, he doesn’t really carry an entire movie. I think I may have mentally conflated this film with the much-sillier sequel, which I also liked.
I didn’t really catch on to the PTSD/Vietnam prisoner of war connection when this was new, but it’s pretty blatant on a modern rewatch. He ends up rescuing Jimmy in a way that he never could with Big Ben, and shows courage that wasn’t there back in the war. Did you ever have one of those situations where you think of something witty to say after the conversation? This is like that, only with courage and war.