You can spend years becoming comfortable in your own house. You develop certain habits and traditions, particular ways of going about your daily business in the sanctity of your own four walls, with the world outside oblivious to your activities and behavior. You are a King, and your Kingdom is yours to do as you please, hygienic or not.
Picture then the sudden intrusion of a stranger into your fiefdom. Where once there was happiness and freedom of expression, there suddenly falls a blanket of oppression and restriction. For example, if you were the kind of free spirit to cavort about your dwelling in the nude, with all manner of privates dangling and swaying in the gentle airconditioned breeze, then no longer could you partake in such unclothed self-expression.
It goes without saying that although this would make for an uncomfortable experience should it happen to you, the possibilities are endless for an entertaining motion picture full of awkward stares, uncomfortable situational hilarity, sexual innuendo, full frontal nudity and oodles of peanut butter being devoured in the buff while sitting on the sofa watching Bear in the Big Blue House.
Unfortunately, this DVD release of House Guest is none of these things. It’s not too hard to see why, being aimed squarely at the family market. This lacklustre and pedestrian comedy plays it nice and easy (read: dull), always on the right side of ‘safe’. The idea here was to keep its main star talking, talking, talking, no matter what came out of his mouth. The problem is nothing interesting or funny comes out of it, just a long stream of forgettable dialogue that wants to sound clever and wise.
But that’s what you get when your main star is Sinbad. Having gone through the motions years ago as the comedian extraordinaire of the moment (read: crap), he popped up (or is that ‘pooped out’?) in many similarly tepid excursions, and all with the same generic flavour and generically bitter aftertaste.
But the worst of House Guest’s crimes is the criminally insane underutilisation of Phil Hartman, a hugely talented and funny man sorely missed from the Simpsons universe. The less said about this the better.
The plot has Sinbad forced into hiding when clichéd tough mob guys come calling for him to repay his debt. Leaving town, he surfaces at an airport and pretends to be a long lost childhood pal of Hartman’s, insinuating himself into his house and family with ‘hilarious’ results (read: not funny). Disney pulls out the standard rule book at this point: bratty kid taught a valuable life lesson by Sinbad, fighting married couple brought together by their determination to save Sinbad from a bullet to the head from tough guys, family reunited and strengthened by Sinbad’s gentle brand of easy going and G-friendly guffaws, family gerbil molestered in Sinbad’s trailer.
Like First Kid, this is another limp and lifeless romp made for another time. My assertion is that more recent Disney fare is of infinitely greater quality, showing more ‘spunk’ and imagination that does more to date House Guest than the mere passing of years could achieve.
As healthy looking as everyone is, the colouring has that ‘90s look with the edge taken off the vibrancy. Grain is visually apparent throughout in doses small enough to be comfortable and not distracting to the Anti-Film Grain League of Unextraordinary Buffoons. Kept at the original 1.85:1, it’s 16:9 enhanced for DVD, giving plenty of head room to the scenes but then the film hardly calls for expansive exterior shots of Sinbad riding a chicken across the Great Plains of America. Then again, that might have improved the film. Detail is so-so and a bit soft, but the film is given plenty of space on this disc for a generally bulletproof transfer, even if the people who pick this off the shelf because they went to the rental store five minutes before closing aren’t going to be too concerned.
Along with French and Spanish language options, the English track is a surround encoded stereo mix at 192kbps, which on the face of it doesn’t promise much, but after a good listen you realise that it does in fact live up to that promise. With mostly Sinbad’s inane banter and attempts at humour fouling up your centre channel, it has little to pull it out of the doldrums. Even the score and lightweight music tracks backing it are dull sounding. The action scenes, if you can call them that, just add another layer of noise but nothing pulls out of the muck.
