House Party (1990)

Play is having a party with his parents out of town joined by his friends Kid and Bilal (Martin Lawrence). School bullies Stab and his brothers Pee-Wee and Zilla have it in for Kid. Kid's father Pop allows him to go to the party until he reads the school letter about Kid's fight with Stab. The boys like Sidney (Tisha Campbell) and Sharane.

This takes the harder edged black culture material and adds a light playful charm. Kid 'n Play are not exactly heavy hitters in the acting department. Play is not much cinematically but Kid does have a fun comedic energy. Play does better when he's rapping. Once the party starts, the movie finds its grove. It's a party and everybody can have fun.

Fmovies: "House Party" is a classic cult flick and an excellent document of late-Eighties/early-Nineties hip-hop music and style.

The movie is never anything less than entertaining, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

People may have forgotten the hip hop duo Kid 'n Play, who were among the first to bring rap to a younger and less hardcore audience, a la Will Smith. This is unfair: they were fine rappers, and even decent actors. Surprisingly though, "House Party" is the Kid show. Play doesn't make as much of an impression.

There are few wonders to behold as impressive as Kid's geometrically perfect high-top fade hairdo. I would love to see how a hairdresser pulls that off.

It's interesting that the only white characters in the movie are authority figures: a principal and two sort-of racist cops. But that's also just another reason to love it; how many majority African American movies have there been, before or since?

Released in 99% white Australia at the height of the warehouse dance party wave, this hilarious all black hip hop indie rang true to us neon shirted whities who could have our own moment of 'rock around the clock style new wave dance madness' by actually dancing in the aisles of the cinema. And what a crummy cinema it was....the Mandolin in Sydney was the mangy red velvet 60s beatnik cinema that was a converted 1930s radio theater. Perfect! I think that night we went to the movies and saw Kid'n'Play's HOUSE PARTY and appropriately went to an all night dance party in a warehouse nearby with 5000 others who secretly knew it was on (yes 5000 others) and like in HOUSE PARTY, you had to know it was on in there.... so we got to see the movie and cross/culture/shift and relive the experience to the same music. HOUSE PARTY like that night is a moment in time, part of the hilarious reckless nights we have all had in the late 80s (see the great tiny1982 indie Oz pic GOING DOWN for proof) ... to new music with hilarious friends and dance tracks that allowed you to dance with 15 different people. I know there were sequels but by then the time had gone and the dance parties were full of bad drugs and bonehead behavior. HOUSE PARTY is the bookend to PARTY MONSTER.. the incredible lavish and absolutely bullseye moment of the 90s captured on film in 2003 with Macauley Culkin and Seth Green. It would be horrifying fun to see these films together in one sitting to identify the night it started and the night it stopped. I suppose it is the same idea wondering how we got from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to "When I Think Of You I Touch Myself". Yes HOUSE PARTY is the innocent side of the coke chopping razor and PARTY MONSTER is the harsh sunlight of next morning.

House Party fmovies. very funny, energetic film with a great dance sequence and a really funny song in the prison. Kid and Play are a great double act and the writing is high quality. I saw a bit of this other Kid and Play film called Class Act and it wasn't half as good because all the jokes were predictable. You can't help but be cheered up by seeing House Party: the ancient, unused condom- how true.

This is a wacky little flick that I saw during 7th grade in class. Lots of forced comedy and wild dialog, but entertaining at certain points. Plenty of my classmates loved it, but I thought it was pretty average though.

Grade C

House Party is sort of like a urban take on Risky Business in the sense that boy has party when parents go out of town for the weekend but the comparison end there. Kid and Play make one of the first hip hop films of the nineties which had a plot. Many young black comedic actors got their start in this film like Martin Lawerence and AJ Johnson. But the true comedic talent in the film is the late Robin Harris. The world only knows what Harris could have done. The script is smart and the direction by Regiland Hudlin is good.