House On Haunted Hill ««½
R, 96m. 1999
Cast & Credits: Geoffrey Rush (Steven Price), Famke Janssen (Evelyn Price), Taye Diggs (Eddie), Ali Larter (Sara Wolfe), Brigette Wilson (Melissa Marr), Peter Gallagher (Dr. Blackburn), Chris Kattan (Watson Pritchett). Screenplay by Dick Beebe based on a story by Robb White. Directed by William Malone.
Movie studios who refuse to offer advance press screenings of upcoming films to critics usually indicates their picture is going to be lousy. Such recent cases would be The Avengers (1998) and MGM’s science fiction dud, Supernova (2000). Neither of those movies made a profit when released theatrically and were gone from cinemas within a month.
House On Haunted Hill may probably be the first movie to date that breaks that common myth. Warner Brothers, the film’s distributor, didn’t offer any press screenings to critics prior to its opening date a couple days before Halloween. Yet, it ranked number one on the list of box office hits Halloween weekend and grossed an unexpected $15 million; close to the same amount it reportedly cost the studio to make the film according to industry insiders.
If Warner Brothers had invited critics to advanced screenings, I have no doubt a majority of the reviews would have been negative. If such a thing had happened, I probably would have been one of the few to say House On Haunted Hill isn’t as bad as the critics say it is.
The film boasts a creepy musical score and is fun to watch for a while before settling on giving the audience, usually those in high school and young college students, what they want and expect for their money’s worth; mass amounts of blood and guts and no scares.
The picture is a remake of the 1958 horror classic that starred Vincent Price. I haven’t seen the original but I have read of the plot in movie review books. Price’s character offers five guests a chance to win $10,000 if they can manage to spend an entire night inside a haunted sanitarium where an insane doctor and his staff carried out macabre torture experiments on his patients.
In this new version, Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush plays Steven Price, an amusement park entrepreneur who literally enjoys scaring the Hell out of people; building roller coasters but not the kind you would find at Six Flags today. These are the ones whose cars jump off the tracks making riders think they’re headed for certain disaster before they realize it is a joke as it jumps onto another track.
Price dresses like a game show host who could very easily host B grade horror movies on late night TV. At the behest of his wife (Famke Janssen), Price throws a special party at an abandoned insane asylum where, like in the original, the patients were tortured and murdered by a psychotic doctor decades ago. He offers the five guests (Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Brigette Wilson, Peter Gallagher and Chris Kattan) $1 million each to one or all of them provided they manage to stay alive for one night inside the supposedly haunted hospital. Do I really need to tell you that near the end only one or two of these people will come out alive?
A better written screenplay would have probably explained how Rush's character knew all these guests had a connection to the asylum's deceased tenants. Then again, given the audience this movie is aimed at, I don't think anyone would bother questioning why certain things in a horror movie don't quite make sense. Still, I had to laugh when one of the characters tells a ghostly dark evil blob as its about to overtake him how he was adopted and had no family members who stayed and died as patients in the mental institution.
The best performance here is by the insane asylum itself, which seems to boast a personality all its own resembling a lighthouse overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The halls are a maze of dimly lit rooms filled with cobwebs that reveal how long the asylum has been abandoned. We see large cauldrons of blood and a museum of mutilated dead bodies encased in glass whose skin has been peeled off revealing bones and internal organs. Ghosts appear on video cameras reenacting grisly operations from decades ago but aren’t actually seen when the camera is off. The place looks exactly like the kinds of haunted houses people pay to visit every October except it is more unsettling than being enjoyably scary, much like the film.
©11/2/99
R, 96m. 1999
Cast & Credits: Geoffrey Rush (Steven Price), Famke Janssen (Evelyn Price), Taye Diggs (Eddie), Ali Larter (Sara Wolfe), Brigette Wilson (Melissa Marr), Peter Gallagher (Dr. Blackburn), Chris Kattan (Watson Pritchett). Screenplay by Dick Beebe based on a story by Robb White. Directed by William Malone.
House On Haunted Hill may probably be the first movie to date that breaks that common myth. Warner Brothers, the film’s distributor, didn’t offer any press screenings to critics prior to its opening date a couple days before Halloween. Yet, it ranked number one on the list of box office hits Halloween weekend and grossed an unexpected $15 million; close to the same amount it reportedly cost the studio to make the film according to industry insiders.
If Warner Brothers had invited critics to advanced screenings, I have no doubt a majority of the reviews would have been negative. If such a thing had happened, I probably would have been one of the few to say House On Haunted Hill isn’t as bad as the critics say it is.
The film boasts a creepy musical score and is fun to watch for a while before settling on giving the audience, usually those in high school and young college students, what they want and expect for their money’s worth; mass amounts of blood and guts and no scares.
The picture is a remake of the 1958 horror classic that starred Vincent Price. I haven’t seen the original but I have read of the plot in movie review books. Price’s character offers five guests a chance to win $10,000 if they can manage to spend an entire night inside a haunted sanitarium where an insane doctor and his staff carried out macabre torture experiments on his patients.
In this new version, Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush plays Steven Price, an amusement park entrepreneur who literally enjoys scaring the Hell out of people; building roller coasters but not the kind you would find at Six Flags today. These are the ones whose cars jump off the tracks making riders think they’re headed for certain disaster before they realize it is a joke as it jumps onto another track.
Price dresses like a game show host who could very easily host B grade horror movies on late night TV. At the behest of his wife (Famke Janssen), Price throws a special party at an abandoned insane asylum where, like in the original, the patients were tortured and murdered by a psychotic doctor decades ago. He offers the five guests (Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Brigette Wilson, Peter Gallagher and Chris Kattan) $1 million each to one or all of them provided they manage to stay alive for one night inside the supposedly haunted hospital. Do I really need to tell you that near the end only one or two of these people will come out alive?
A better written screenplay would have probably explained how Rush's character knew all these guests had a connection to the asylum's deceased tenants. Then again, given the audience this movie is aimed at, I don't think anyone would bother questioning why certain things in a horror movie don't quite make sense. Still, I had to laugh when one of the characters tells a ghostly dark evil blob as its about to overtake him how he was adopted and had no family members who stayed and died as patients in the mental institution.
The best performance here is by the insane asylum itself, which seems to boast a personality all its own resembling a lighthouse overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The halls are a maze of dimly lit rooms filled with cobwebs that reveal how long the asylum has been abandoned. We see large cauldrons of blood and a museum of mutilated dead bodies encased in glass whose skin has been peeled off revealing bones and internal organs. Ghosts appear on video cameras reenacting grisly operations from decades ago but aren’t actually seen when the camera is off. The place looks exactly like the kinds of haunted houses people pay to visit every October except it is more unsettling than being enjoyably scary, much like the film.
©11/2/99
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