How ‘House Party’ Ushered in a New Era at New Line Cinema — and Hollywood at Large

When writer-director Reginald Hudlin‘s “House Party” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1990 and became a nationwide theatrical hit a couple of months later, it changed American movies as much as “Pulp Fiction” would a few years later. Like Quentin Tarantino‘s influential crime film, “House Party” was a perfectly calibrated combination of familiar tropes channeled through a new voice. Like “Pulp Fiction,” it smuggled its profound insights and philosophical heft into a spectacularly entertaining commercial package. And like that movie, its success transformed the company that made it and paved the way for dozens of great films that probably wouldn’t have been made had it never existed.

Yet, on its surface, “House Party” is a relatively modest, unassuming movie — a low-budget ($2.5 million) comedy about a group of Black teenagers who throw and attend the house party of the film’s title. The movie resembles many popular teen flicks in its structure (it takes place over the course of roughly 24 hours) and events. (The kids fall in love, evade authority figures, battle with bullies, etc.) It would make a great double feature with George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” or Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.”

Such familiarity was by design. On the audio commentary for the brand new Criterion 4K UHD release of “House Party,” Hudlin says that he wanted to make a movie about himself and his friends that was in the tradition of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “Risky Business,” and part of the film’s genius lies in Hudlin’s ability to harness archetypal teen movie motifs for his very specific purposes. The conventions are so well known to us that they serve as a kind of shorthand, allowing Hudlin to clearly and concisely establish his world and its characters and then dive deep into their nuances, giving “House Party” a breadth and depth most filmmakers would struggle to cram into 104 minutes.

Elements of teen movies that had come to feel cliché by the time “House Party” came out in 1990 are given new life by the context in which Hudlin places them and the sensitivity and confidence with which he directs his actors. Teenagers running from cops or teachers has been a staple of teen movies both tragic (“Rebel Without a Cause”) and comic (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) for as long as Hollywood has made them, but in “House Party” the device is given added resonance by the fact that these kids are Black. When cops harass the teens of “House Party,” the scenes evoke and comment upon a cultural history of violence and oppression that’s (correctly) missing from the movies of John Hughes and Amy Heckerling.

Incredibly, Hudlin references the historical prevalence of police violence against the Black community without losing sight of the fact that he’s making a comedy. There isn’t a single scene in “House Party” where the laughs stop or a moment where the movie grinds to a halt to deliver a message. Hudlin is a political filmmaker, but there’s no virtue signaling in his movie; many of the points are unspoken and simply woven into the fabric of the setting and the narrative. Hudlin doesn’t have to stop the audience from laughing to tell them that in real life, police brutality isn’t funny — he takes it as a given that the viewer is intelligent enough to tell the difference.

Even when Hudlin delivers an explicit message — as in a subplot about Kid (Christopher Reid) and his new girlfriend Sidney (Tisha Campbell) practicing safe sex — he wraps it in a hilarious sight gag that keeps the film from becoming preachy. He also, in this scene and every other, strikes a delicate tonal balance that’s as difficult to achieve as it is invisible and seemingly effortless when it’s done right: “House Party” is naturalistic and slightly heightened and theatrical, anchored in reality but stylized and charged with as much visual and aural energy as any classic MGM musical.

‘House Party’Courtesy of New Line Cinema / Everett Collection

This musical component is part of what made “House Party” feel so special when it was released, and what makes it play so well now. In 1990, musicals had fallen on very hard times in Hollywood — the only one to hit big in the few years before “House Party” was the animated “The Little Mermaid.” With its focus on music-loving youth, “House Party” plays like a smart, self-aware updating of the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland “let’s put on a show” movies of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s in the details and fresh context that “House Party” becomes something different — and something groundbreaking.

The lead teenagers in “House Party” are played by Kid ‘n Play, a hip-hop duo comprised of Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin whose popularity was on the rise in the 1980s. They were so popular, in fact, that Martin didn’t want to do “House Party” — he thought it could only slow their momentum, since Run-DMC’s hip-hop movie, “Tougher Than Leather,” had flopped. Martin’s reasoning, as he discusses in an interview on the Criterion disc, was that if Run-DMC couldn’t make a hit movie, how could Kid ‘n Play?

Of course, what Kid ‘n Play had that Run-DMC didn’t was Reginald Hudlin. “Tougher Than Leather” was directed by Rick Rubin, a record producer with zero filmmaking experience; Hudlin had been honing his vision for “House Party” for years, ever since he made a short version of the film as his thesis project in 1983. That movie, which is included on the Criterion release, plays like a rough draft of the feature to come, with several incidents and lines of dialogue that would make their way into the 1990 version. Most importantly, it exhibits the passion for hip-hop music and dancing that would make the feature version of “House Party” such a raucous celebration for both the filmmakers and the audience.

In the years between the short and the feature, hip-hop made its way to movie screens in a handful of films of varying quality (“Beat Street,” “Breakin’,” “Rappin'”), none of which fully captured the energy of the music the way that Hudlin did. (Although in 1985, Michael Schultz’s “Krush Groove” came close.) Hudlin’s musical numbers — both the ones in which Kid ‘n Play actually perform and the dance sequences that simply depict the teenagers exuberantly partying to the music — are meticulously choreographed (often by the actors themselves) explosions of movement and color that find the perfect visual corollary for the sound of hip-hop.

‘House Party’Courtesy of New Line Cinema / Everett Collection

The only movie that had really done something comparable before “House Party” was Spike Lee’s 1988 comedy “School Daze,” featuring its “Da Butt” set piece. (In a nice piece of synchronicity, that song was co-written by “House Party” composer Marcus Miller, who would go on to create an all-time banger of a score for Hudlin’s next movie, “Boomerang.”) That scene was terrific, but “House Party” extends its effect for nearly a whole second act, and in the process achieves Hudlin’s goal of making his own “Animal House.” His party is every bit as iconic as the toga party from that movie, if not more so.

While the success of “Animal House” led to a wave of imitators — lowbrow sex comedies from the hilarious (“Revenge of the Nerds”) to the inane (“Porky’s”) — the legacy of “House Party” was broader and more lasting. The movie was financed by New Line Cinema at a time when that company was a minor producer and distributor known primarily for horror movies; their biggest hits to date were the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films. New Line wasn’t really in the business of making films for Black viewers or by Black filmmakers, but they knew there was crossover between that audience and the audience for their horror flicks, so they decided to roll the dice on Hudlin — a gamble that paid off when “House Party” made double its budget on its opening weekend and went on to gross 10 times its budget by the end of its theatrical run. And that wasn’t even taking into account the waterfall of cash that came from the movie’s immensely successful home video release.

Realizing what they had, New Line began green-lighting Black movies in a frenzy. The intentions may have been purely economic, but the effect was that a generation of filmmakers created a new golden age of Black cinema, an era that encompassed everything from the lyrical romance of Ted Witcher’s “Love Jones” and searing political commentary of Bill Duke’s explosive “Deep Cover” to the light comedy of “Friday” and the heavy drama of “Menace II Society.” There were overlooked masterpieces, like the Cassavetes-inflected “Hangin’ with the Homeboys,” hit audience pleasers like “Set it Off” and “Blade,” and underrated gems like Robert Townsend’s hilarious (and unfairly maligned) satire “B*A*P*S.”

That’s just scratching the surface of New Line’s 1990s output when it comes to Black cinema, and other studios soon followed New Line’s lead. The artistic and, more importantly, commercial success of “House Party” (as well as Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” the year before) accelerated other studios’ efforts to produce and distribute Black films, leading to significant releases from Sony (“Boyz n the Hood”), Warner Brothers (“New Jack City”), Paramount (“Boomerang,” “Juice”), Fox (“Waiting to Exhale”), Universal (“The Best Man”), and even Disney (“Dead Presidents”).

Again, these are just representative samples, not anywhere close to a complete list of the movies that came out in the best decade ever for Black cinema when it comes to breadth, depth, and volume. “House Party” wasn’t the sole instigator for this trend, but it played a key role — and within its own narrative confines provided a model for the variety of Black experiences that could play out on screen, since it didn’t limit itself to one genre or socioeconomic framework. It was a comedy and a musical and a romance and a coming-of-age drama, and its characters came from the projects and upper-class suburbia, as well as a fully developed spectrum in between.

One could argue that “House Party” had ripple effects that went far beyond Black movies, given that its success led to New Line’s expansion in the same way that “sex, lies and videotape” and “Pulp Fiction” led to Miramax’s. Without “House Party” would there be a “Boogie Nights” (and thus a “One Battle After Another”)? A “Lord of the Rings” trilogy? A “Weapons?”

It’s impossible to authoritatively say, of course, and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. Because leaving legacy and influence aside, “House Party” is so generous with its own pleasures that when you’re watching, its influence and impact are irrelevant. Hudlin would go on to make other great movies as both director (“Boomerang”) and producer (“Django Unchained”), but he never made another one as bursting at the seams with infectious ebullience. It’s one of the all-time great movies to share with a live audience, and it works equally well as an intimate experience at home. A special screening at Sundance this week will provide an opportunity for the former, while the new Criterion release is the best way to facilitate the latter.

Either way, revisiting “House Party” is one of the best possible ways a cinephile can spend 104 minutes.

“House Party” is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Criterion and will be screen January 27 at the Sundance Film Festival.