House

Struggling with his Vietnam novel, an author seeks solitude: where else but in a haunted house. Visions of his missing son and his war service intrude, along with a monster from the closet and flying garden tools. This could be played any number of ways: straight, paranoid fantasy, Abbott & Costello. The latter temporarily prevail: when the cops arrive just as he's hiding a body under the stairs our hero all but cries out 'Abbott!' and any seriousness is further undermined by having Norm from TV's Cheers living next door. In the last reel comes the revelation that most of the foregoing has been engineered by the crumbling but ambulatory corpse of a Vietnam buddy nursing a grudge. Fortunately the ghostly veteran packs non-ghostly, indeed live, hand grenades and it all ends, not before time, with a big bang.