The BOARDINGHOUSE is open for business again with the film's fourth digital physical media release in AGFA's two-disc Blu-ray special edition.

Hoffman House has been abandoned since the Hoffmans met mysterious deaths and their traumatized child was committed to a mental hospital (later seen subsequently escaping after compelling a doctor and an orderly to telekinetic suicides). Subsequent buyers have all met with mysterious deaths, including Dr. Hank Royce whose estate (including the house) passes to his nephew Jim Royce (director Johnn Wintergate), a speedo-clad New Wave/New Age yuppie dabbling in telekinesis. He hits upon the idea to turn the house into the ultimate bachelor pad, putting out an ad for unattached and beautiful boarders between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. He winds up with five boarders, including aspiring rock star Victoria (Wintergate's musician wife Kalassu), Cindy (Mary McKinley, CALIFORNIA GIRLS) who is on the run from her abusive fiancé (James Brolin's kid brother Brian, billed as "Brian Bruderlin"), and pretty, unassuming Debbie (men's magazine model Lindsay Freeman, the "body double" of De Palma's BODY DOUBLE) who spends a lot of time gardening while the others are pursuing stardom. It goes without saying that the force that killed the people in the prologue is still in the house and that Jim has (unwittingly?) provided it with a healthy supply of scantily-clad victims.

Although shot on 3/4" videotape in "HorrorVision" – a William Castle-esque gimmick involving images that announce oncoming gore and violence – BOARDINGHOUSE actually made it to theaters scanned to 35mm. Although the filmmakers claim the film was shot as a spoof and that the distributor made them edit it into a straightforward horror feature – more on that below – it feels like a less-competently shot, equally quirky variation on Andy Milligan's CARNAGE by creative people on the margins of the industry. Bad videography – sometimes the strobing is intentional, sometimes it seems to be the iris auto-adjusting to the natural lighting – bad hair, crude special effects, and some hilarious performances overshadow a few decent performances and the threadbare plotting; so much so that one may not realize that there is a whodunit element until a human culprit reveals themselves just before the climactic telekinetic battle between good and evil. There is actually something surprisingly endearing about the whole enterprise as a DIY regional horror film shot in Los Angeles by Hollywood hopefuls. It helps of course that there is a healthy helping of nudity, dollops of unconvincing gore, and cheesy eighties music (33 1/3 band members Wintergate and Kalassu provide the score and some original songs). It must be the degree of low budget, inexperienced, downright technically-inept enthusiasm behind the scenes that makes a film this bad not a total write-off.

Although the film actually had a decent-sized theatrical release – complete with a TV ad campaign – the film did a lot of business on VHS from Paragon (the memorable trailer preceding a number of their early releases). According to IMDb, the first Paragon VHS edition featured the original home video cut which ran ten minutes longer than the theatrical cut, retaining the "HorrorVision" introduction, narration over the computer text detailing the house's history, the video flashes preceding the gore scenes, and some more overtly comic bits. A reissue from Paragon reportedly featured the shorter theatrical cut. A subsequent, presumably unauthorized edition came out in a big box edition from AIR (Ariel Video) under the clever (or stupid) title HOUSEGEIST (misspelled "Housegiest" on the back cover synopsis).

Code Red released the film on DVD in 2008 in the aforementioned home video cut with commentary by Wintergate and Kalassu. Picture quality was decent given the source, but issues with the original recording and the aging master were exacerbated by Massacre Video's subsequent 2013 special edition which squeezed the home video cut and a fan-assembled two-and-a- half-hour "director's cut" onto one dual-layer disc with a new commentary and a handful of new extras and archival video from the Wintergates' music career. During Olive Films' brief and erratic partnership with Grindhouse, the film was reissued in 2015, moving the director's cut to a second disc and splitting the rest of the extras between them.

None of the three DVD releases utilized the 35mm materials for the feature and it was long thought lost; however, a single 35mm print has long been in possession of the American Genre Film Archive, and a 2K preservation scan topline's their new two-disc Blu-ray edition. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen presentation of the theatrical cut (87:57) shares the first disc with a 1080i upscale of the original home video cut (98:46). Given the broadcast quality video source material, the theatrical cut's 35mm has the look of a 16mm (or Super 8 at times) regional horror flick while the home video cut looks less like a "soap opera" than a poorly-lit episode of THREE'S COMPANY. The "well-loved" 35mm version is riddled with vertical scratches, but it is hard to distinguish some of the blunt cut-down editing from jumps due to missing frames (apart from the end credits crawl).

Given that the Wintergates provided two commentaries already on the Code Red and Massacre releases, it is unfortunate but perhaps understandable that they did not provide one for the new release – that, or AGFA assumed that people who would shell out for the Blu-ray must be obsessive enough to own the earlier editions – however, the two briefly appear on a twenty-seven minute partial commentary track on the theatrical cut by Bleeding Skull’s Joseph A. Ziemba who discusses the influence of the film during his own formative years and that of his site Bleeding Skull and facetiously instructs the viewer that those who deride the film are not watching it in the correct context. Wintergate and Kalassu provide some brief input, noting the distribution deal with Howard Willette who insisted the film be recut to be a more serious horror film, the astronomical costs of the 35mm scan, suggestion that the Paragon video deal was not legitimate, and the difficulty Willette's widow had finding any material for the film including a single print.

A second commentary track features actress Maryel McKinley – billed in the film as "Mary McKinley" – and is moderated by Sean King and Mike Justice. McKinley reveals that she was a casting director at the time working for a computerized service, and that although she had performing experience in the Icecapades and other stage work, she only put herself up for acting when needed. She notes that BOARDINGHOUSE was one of three films in which she appeared with fellow casting agency signees Freeman – better known in the adult world as Alexandra Day – and Tracy O'Brian including CALIFORNIA GIRLS and THE BEACH GIRLS. She also reveals that she and Freeman were recruited for fantasy scenes to spice up HOMEWORK for release once Joan Collins achieved fame on DYNASTY and insist that Collins was not doubled for nude shots but insisted to the press that she had been. The disc also includes the film's 35mm theatrical trailer (1:31) and a whopping eighteen home video trailers and TV spots (14:06) for the feature.

The second disc includes a previously-unreleased cut of the film produced in 1984 titled PSYCHO KILLER (98:08). Apart from the new title card and the subtitle "A Twisted Comedy", it appears very similar to the home video cut, and appears to have been an attempt by the Wintergates to reconstruct their original home video cut at a time when they were having trouble getting any materials for the film back from Willette's widow. On the other hand, the second disc marks the debut of the Wintergates' unreleased 1989 feature film SALLY & JESS (94:25) in which the titular siblings (Wintergate children Shanti and Kody) are ripped away from their idyllic suburban existence when homemaker mother Michelle (Theresa Hunter) collapses and dies from an undiagnosed health problem and architect father Peter (Wintergate) is killed when the chartered jet rushing him home from Los Angeles crashes. When unsympathetic bureaucrat Miss Kolder (Kalassu, billed as "Kristina Winter") decides to split the siblings up, planning to set up younger Sally with a new family and send Jess to foster care, Sally and Jess run away into the mountains, putting themselves in danger from the elements, wild animals, and a child killer (Lou Dunn) whose victims have been discovered throughout the first act of the film.

Shot in Idaho where the Wintergates moved to raise their children in a handbuilt house-turned-compound away from the literally and figuratively toxic atmosphere of Southern California, SALLY & JESS is a much more technically-accomplished production, not only recruiting virtually the entire town where they settled but featuring slicker 16mm photography, better editing, and a score by the Wintergates that better underlines the film's emotions. As far as regional flicks go, it is probably comparable to a better-made companion to Al Adamson's Utah-lensed family film LOST. If the dramatic aspects feel a bit more skewed towards the adult with child killings and an overall lack of lightness in tone, it could be said to embody the fears not only of the Wintergates as New Age-y yuppie types getting back to nature with their children, but also of eighties parents in general where every strange van or truck holds a kidnapper – the fact that Wintergate appears to depict the killer as able to snatch single children off of crowded schoolyards without anyone noticing suggests the bogeyman presence in the minds of eighties parents and children – tragedy can rip apart a happy family at any moment, and government types who are supposed to help families are all burnt-out acoholics (Kolder takes a sip from a bagged bottle locked in a drawer every time she sits down at her desk).

What prevents the film from seeming like a catalog of scare tactics is the seemingly genuine well-meaning of the filmmakers with no traces of cynicism evident in such "wholesome" scenes of the family feeding and blanketing the poor and discussing the social pressures of growing up. The only subversive aspect is the manner in which the children seem to misinterpret the lesson of their parents to "Leave if you don't feel like you belong," when Jess comes home from a party where his friends are drinking as the children apply it to running away from foster care; or possibly not since their actions eventually result in the film's happy ending after being rescued from the brink of death. While it is understandable why the film did not get a theatrical release, it is hard to believe it was not picked up for television or video.

Transferred from a 16mm answer print, SALLY & JESS' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.37:1 pillarboxed fullscreen transfer looks completely spotless, crisp, colorful, and ideally-framed (suggesting home video and TV may have been the target for the project). The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 track nicely renders the cleanly-recorded dialogue and scoring, and optional English SDH subtitles are also provided. The film is accompanied by a new audio commentary by Kalassu and Wintergate, moderated by Sean King, in which they discuss their reasons for leaving Los Angeles for Idaho, building their home – their stable is now a recording studio for their grown children – recruiting their entire town (along with the real sheriff and the then-mayor) to work on the film in front of and behind the camera, and the availability of some of their home movies from the time on their YouTube page.