House II: The Second Story 4K 1987 Ultra HD 2160p

The new owner of the haunted house comes into contact with reanimated corpses and demons in search of an ancient Aztec skull that possesses magical powers.

User Review

The movie didn't really grab me. Well, it's definitely not as good as the first one.

The plot follows two friends who move into a house that used to belong to one of their parents. But the parents were murdered by someone, and upon arriving, the friends discover that the house isn’t just any house—it’s up to all sorts of strange things. To keep these things under control, they need to carry an artifact in the form of a crystal skull, but someone is constantly trying to steal it. No, not thieves or robbers, but something far worse.

A lackluster and chaotic movie. Well, “lackluster”... Anyway, let’s start with the fact that there are absolutely no connections—not even the faintest ones—to the first part. There’s a general premise—a big house that’s up to all sorts of mischief and has portals to other dimensions. But in the first movie, this was handled more subtly; here, the filmmakers have generously scattered portals to all sorts of worlds, but they’ve done it rather clumsily, with little cohesion.

The characters lack any charisma; the Gross-Stark duo doesn’t hold a candle to the Katt-Wendt duo from the first film. And although Stark showed glimpses of charisma, he often overacted. As a result, the following characters stood out: the protagonist’s half-decomposed, resurrected great-grandfather and the unflappable electrician Bill, played by none other than Pixar staff member John Ratzenberger.

The special effects and sets are generally good, though they leave an unpleasant impression of being low-budget. And while the animatronic prehistoric creatures (the bird and the green dog-caterpillar) look cute, they’re poorly animated. There’s no shortage of sets, by the way—you’ve got an Aztec tomb, a prehistoric world, and even the Wild West—the latter theme, incidentally, is harped on particularly heavily; apparently, Ethan Wiley once really wanted to make a Western.

The overall premise is this: while the first film was a horror movie (albeit not a scary one) laced with excellent dark humor, here the horror has disappeared entirely, replaced by adventures in the vein of "The Dumb and the Dumber" or a lighthearted version of "Indiana Jones", featuring entirely ordinary and by no means dark jokes. All of this is spiced up with a dash of action—and while the shootouts are well done, the showdown in the Aztec dungeon is a quiet horror.

Harry Manfredini is still the same, but his music has taken a turn for the worse—the shift from eerie instrumental compositions to synthesizers has taken its toll, and this collaboration didn’t turn out well—the music here, while not terrible, is far too jarring to the ears; I don’t like it at all. Although some of the little motifs did remind me of the first part, it still wasn’t quite the same.

Well, what else… I liked the ending, but not enough to raise my rating by a point. And what can I say in the end—you might ask me, “Why are you comparing this movie to the first one, since they’re not alike?” But excuse me—if you’re calling it a sequel to "House", then you’d better maintain at least some connection. If the movie had a different title, there’d be no comparisons, and off it goes with a six out of ten. But it turned out the way it did.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (50.1 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
#English: FLAC 2.0
#German: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

Info Subtitles