Heroism Reviews Alpha Classic: House II: The Second Story
Let's return to the 80s for an unsung classic. 1987s House II: The Second Story.
And while a sequel, House II has nearly nothing in relation to the original House, a far darker strange tale of a PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran horror writer mourning the loss of his son in a haunted house. The sequel has new characters, a new plot, a lighter tone, a new location and new strangeness.
There she is! Carmen Sandiego!
Returning the ancestral home, yuppie Jesse uncovers alluring evidence of an ancient artifact, a crystal skull, being in the possession of his family.
Look, if you ain't willing to go Bald Knobbin' or Grave Robbin' by the light of the moon, what kind of friend are you?
Turning to the a little digging with best friend Charlie, (and by that, we don't mean, "pouring through old articles & maps at the local library") Jesse recovers the skull and his great-great-grandfather (also named Jesse).
It turns out that rumors of his demise had been greatly exaggerated.
It also turns out that this Horror-Comedy is also one of the first high-concept examples of Weird West film. One of the few genre predecessors not involving [Famous Outlaw here] Vs. [Classic Monster here] in a B-movie cheapie being Harryhousen's Cowboys & Dinosaurs stop motion tale The Valley of Gwangi.
And they truly manage to make the tale sufficiently weird.
Weird, but lovable.
The effect of returning the skull to it's place on the mantle attracts every manner of Pulp-esque strangeness to the house, far beyond the average ghosts & ghouls. The House itself is a nexus point to uncanny regions and fluctuations in time & space, with every door opening to any potential where and whenever.
Okay, we fetch some eggs the size of our own heads for omelettes this morning, and maybe a sidekick or jungle girl, but then we go back!
Multiple evil creatures and characters are out for the skull and its power, and when it disappears (again) it's time to call in the experts:
NOR-m er, CLIFF!
At this point we're at Full Pulp craziness as a trio of working class heros crawl through a hole in the wall of a haunted house into a cross dimensional pagan temple to rescue a beautiful jungle girl from human sacrifice. Half the scenes of this movie resemble the effect of flipping through cable channels on a Saturday afternoon.
How to recognize true pagan evil. The 80s girl is stretched out on a slab of stone to the sound of gutteral chanting, instead of stretched out across the hood of a car to the sound of hair metal.
Moldy: Character sheet with novellette-length backstory.
Oldie: Optimized character stats on 3x5 cards.
Boldly:
And if the DM asks for backstory, you just start repeating Whitesnake song lyrics.
In the finale, the festivities are interrupted by 'Slim', Grandpa Jesse's old partner-in-crime, and a man equally zombified.
Coming soon to a Home Depot near you! (Okay, and Texas Haunters Convention near you, too. (If you live in Texas, that is))
And here, I'll get to the meat of this article. House II: The Second Story is a must-see for any tabletop roleplaying group, especially any game master looking for a quick springboard to play with. It comes across as an unofficial adaptation of the classic Zork text adventures, with its multidimensional anomaly of a house and mysterious artifacts. Equally its a reversal of the dungeon crawl, as the heroes have the Item of Power at an early stage, and must protect it at the fixed location. You could mine to story for ideas in a Dungeon Builder/Tower Defense campaign, as the monsters are more than willing to come to you for a change. I've dug this movie since I was a kid, and the off the wall peaks of this film place this in a tier with the Sam Raimi classic Army of Darkness for gamer movie adventure fodder, even if one cult classic is more widely recognized than the other.
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