There's a series of fairly ...
Question: There's a series of fairly cheesy horror movies that started in the 1980s with House. There's a House 2 and a House 4, but I've never even heard of a "House 3." Did they just skip over it?
Answer: Not exactly. As you say, a look at "House" titles yields House (1986), followed by House II: The Second Story (1987) and House IV (1992), but no "House III." Which is not because "House III" was skipped over but because it was released in the U.S. as The Horror Show (1989). Sean S. Cunningham, who produced the Friday the 13th series, was also behind the House films and envisioned them all as stand-alones with no continuing characters or locations, just a franchise name (which was also the way he thought the Friday films should go; to his credit, he's often said that that just goes to show what he knows). But things didn't work out that way: House II is a stand-alone, House IV is a direct sequel to House, and "House III" is just a mess. An extremely troubled production, The Horror Show went through a midshoot change of director and direction: Australian filmmaker David Blythe, who'd recently made a promising horror picture called Death Warmed Up, was fired after shooting about half the script and then replaced by special-effects artist Jim Isaac, who went on to make Jason X (2002). By all accounts it was chaos, and the result is a disjointed jumble, so I suspect the prevailing attitude when it was finished involved making back what money there was to make and not undermining the future earning potential of the House series.
