Like the general nature of the title event that takes up most of its runtime, you won’t remember the particulars of the likable comedy House Party (1990) years from now, but it will broadly stick around in your memory long afterward as a good time. The movie — which was writer-director Reginald Hudlin’s feature-length directing debut, based on an acclaimed short film he’d made while attending Harvard — mostly covers 24 hours in the life of a high-school student who goes by Kid (Christopher “Kid” Reid). At the beginning of the film, Kid is invited to a house party being thrown tonight by his friend Play (Christopher “Play” Martin); it’s a can’t-miss event. The invite, extended to most of the student body, at first welcomes pause for most — it’s happening on a school night. But there’s an urgency that makes most people tuck away their reservations and say yes as their RSVP: Play’s parents are away on vacation, and if he’s going to have a blowout of a party it’s going to be now or never.
Kid will certainly be going; some others, though, want to impede on his fun. He has to painstakingly avoid his loving but stern father (the late Robin Harris), who grounds him when he receives word of bad behavior at school; a trio of muscle-bound bullies played by (too old-looking to be playing high-schoolers) members of the music group Full Force on the hunt for Kid after an earlier slight; and a pair of baldly racist cops who stop him en route to the gathering for looking “suspicious.” Kid simply getting to and later coming from the house party become comic set pieces in themselves. There’s even a botched attempt at a musical performance, made indelible by a surrealistically random George Clinton cameo, when Kid inadvertently crashes a hoity-toity outdoor soirée down the way. Kid is like the heroic main character of a video game working desperately to avoid forces who want nothing more than to stop him in his tracks. With his miles-high hi-top haircut, goggle eyes, and caricatured lankiness, Reid certainly looks the part even if he doesn’t have the goofy personality to match: he’s so discernibly thoughtful that he seems far older than his years. (Some of that could also be attributed to the deadpan Reid, like mostly everyone else in the cast, being in his mid-20s during the shoot.)
The movie maintains a pleasant hum that makes you happy to be with its characters; you’re almost always smiling. House Party is especially good during scenes between just Kid and his love interest Sydney (Tisha Campbell); they have such fluent chemistry that, when Hudlin decides to put an ellipsis at the end of the sequence in which Kid walks Sydney home, we’re a little disappointed not to get the dialogue they had the entire walk. Reid and Campbell have that effect on us as performers: we want to hear what they have to say when their guards are down, free of a party setting’s highs.
Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin in House Party.
House Party tends to fall flat when it intermittently attempts slapstick-style comedy — Hudlin simply doesn’t have a feel for it — or inserts music sequences. The latter move, which one might predict ahead of watching the movie given its ensemble comprises not one but three musical groups (it also includes members from Groove B. Chill), works OK when Kid and Play have a rap battle during the party, for example, but also provides the movie its nadir when Reid winds up in jail late in the film. To ward off intimidating inmates while he waits for his friends to bail, Kid uses rapping as a tactic to prevent them from sexually assaulting him. The whole scene is clumsy and homophobic.
But what House Party does well outweighs its missteps. The $2.5 million proved a hit — it made its budget back 10 times — and spawned four sequels. The first couple of them, which stuck with the main characters, did worse critically but were comparably financially successful. Though taken solely on its own House Party feels minor, more broadly it’s significant. After the previous decade saw filmmaker John Hughes dominating the teen movie, Hudlin’s film, with its almost entirely Black ensemble, counteracted the tendency by Hughes and his genre peers to consistently revolve their movies around white characters and the suburban milieus they occupied. It also marked a change of pace for Black representation in mainstream cinema, in which escapism was at the forefront without, as was common at the time, reinforcing stereotypical story developments and character types.
House Party is enjoyable and undemanding; like the festivities Kid has to work so hard to get to, it’s built, above all, for a night of fun. “My whole career has been focused on showing sides of Black life that aren’t normally seen,” Hudlin recently told The Ringer. “[With House Party] I was really interested in doing something different and, at the time, there were a lot of very explicitly political films being made. Which is great, but I thought the best way to say something political is to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re sending a message at all.”
Peterson Reviews 