This House tale has nothing to do with the first "House" of a couple of years earlier and doesn't really qualify as a sequel even as it tries to capture some of that same wry humor, but it doesn't stand well on its own, being mostly non-sensical. Plot has to do with another house, this one with Aztec-influenced architecture, also with other-dimensional passages now and then. Some ghost or demon has been after a special skull for unknown reasons, killing the main character's parents 25 years earlier. The main character (Gross) goes after the jewel-covered skull by digging up an ancestor's grave and ends up resurrecting his great great grandpa (Dano) as a 100+ year old zombie. The pic then dwells on this old dude in unfunny scenes, but Gross and his buddy (Stark) also show why they never had great careers in the movies. The cast is uniformly lame throughout. It also all seems to be an excuse to have a few scenes in a prehistoric jungle, with brief dinosaur FX. Bill Maher shows up in a small role; he made his mark later in his Politically Incorrect & HBO shows. Oddly enough, the main connection to the previous film is that another actor from the "Cheers" TV show plays a part (Ratzenberger here; Wendt in the first one). The old guy's nemesis finally shows up near the end, still after that skull. It's all poorly paced and exceedingly dull, failing at the humor and just plain stupid - unless you're 6 or 7 years old, maybe.
Review of House II: The Second Story
