The Horror Show AKA House 3 (1989)

What's It About?

Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen) finally catches serial killer Meat Cleaver Max (Brion James), and sees him executed by electric chair.  But Max is able to transfer his consciousness into an electrical form and begins haunting McCarthy's house.

 Is it Any Good?

It's a known fact at this point that House 3, even by the standards of the tenuous connections that hold the House series together, is not connected to the others.  It was intended to be a different movie originally and added to the series due to vague tonal similarities to the first two films.

As a House movie, The Horror Show doesn't work but as its own thing it's pretty good.  The Horror Show is actually a twin film with Shocker.  While it doesn't have a lot of the flaws that Shocker had it has its own.  While I love Brion James' Meat Cleaver Max more than I enjoyed Mitch Pileggi's Horace Pinker, there was a certain awful charm in the never-ending waterfall of filth spilling out of Pinker's mouth in any given scene.  Meat Cleaver Max certainly has more creative murder scenes and better gore gags and I like the way he comes back to life better than Pinker's body-switching antics.  Max is even more of a cut-rate Freddy Krueger than Pinker is, employing many of the same hallucinogenic gimmicks.  But James brings a lot of his charm to these dream sequences and one in-particular involving a cooked turkey is easily the most memorable moment in the film.

The Horror Show still isn't quite the movie I wanted Shocker to be but it's a lot closer, having more gore and a better handle on tone than Wes Craven's film.  It's a great lesser-appreciated supernatural slasher film and it's a wonderful showcase of Brion James' talent.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Buy it.