At first, I wasn't sure if House on Haunted Hill was a movie or a game. When I got my ticket, the girl at the box office also handed me a scratch-off game piece enticing me with the chance to win $100,000 (needless to say, I didn't win). Okay, so here's a movie that the studio (Warner Brothers) wouldn't screen for critics, and now they're using a game to help sell the picture. Not very promising. (The last time this promotional gimmick was used was in the 1987 turkey Million Dollar Mystery; it was ironic because, while the contest winner took home a cool million, the film itself failed to earn that much at the box office).
On the plus side, House on Haunted Hill is a remake of the old William Castle horror film, and I've always been a sucker for these kinds of things. And, of course, it was Halloween weekend, a time when a good, gory horror flick is always being sought. In the end, the pluses outweighed the minuses. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I liked this movie. It's much like going into a really good carnival haunted house. (My biggest regret is that the remake was not filmed in "Emergo" as the original was. This was a process wherein an inflatable skeleton on an invisible wire would fly over the audience's heads at a specified point in the movie. As Castle explains in his superb autobiography "Step Right Up! I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America," the process was a failure because of teenage boys with slingshots.)
The new version centers around Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush), an innovative amusement park magnate who loves finding new ways to scare people. After enjoying the triumph of opening a new roller-coaster, he plans a birthday party for his wife (Famke Jannsen). The two hate each other, so he opts to have the party in an abandoned old mental institution where, she presumes, he intends to kill her. A group of guests are invited: a movie executive (Ali Larter), a washed-up actress (Bridgette Wilson), a disgraced athlete (Taye Diggs), a doctor (Peter Gallagher who, with his poofy hair, nerd glasses, and halting dialogue appears to be playing Jeff Goldblum), and the young man ("Saturday Night Live"'s Chris Kattan) who inherited the institution from his father.
Price offers them all a reward: anyone who lives through the night will receive $1,000,000. The house, of course, is filled with ghosts and monsters who begin attacking the partygoers one by one. Most of them are very demonic looking beings, prone to eerily shaking their bodies the way a mixer shakes a can of paint. As the Kattan character explains, the place is "alive" and soon everyone is locked inside - doors closed, windows sealed.
Watching House on Haunted Hill, I was reminded of the year's other haunted house picture, The Haunting. I didn't care much for that film. It was too pretty - the effects seemed too much like effects. This one, on the other hand, looks right. The institution is dark, it's wet, and it's dirty. There are catacombs throughout the basement, containing sharp corners that might potentially conceal something deadly.
At this point, I find myself unable to defend the movie on usual terms. There certainly isn't anything new or original about it. The characters are essentially slaves to the gore and horror effects. The plot is little more than a series of scenes in which people encounter demons of various kinds while trying to find a way out of the house.
Despite this, I found myself willingly turning off my brain and just enjoying it. The cast, while stuck in one-dimensional roles, at least performs energetically. I enjoyed many of the visuals, especially the shaking creatures, who are legitimately eerie. Most of all, the movie is effectively tongue-in-cheek, approaching the material with some of the same morbid humor that made HBO's "Tales From the Crypt" so entertaining (the film was produced by Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, and Gilbert Adler, the trio behind that TV series). The whole thing works on that level, combining classic gore and knowing humor; I'm sure the readers of Fangoria magazine will rank this as one of the year's best.
When I was a child, one of my neighbors was the manager of a local movie theater. Knowing I was a movie fan even at such an early age, he gave me a handful of posters that were left over. One of them was for a film whose title I no longer remember. The premise, though, was that a group of people were trapped in a haunted house. The tag line informed that only one would survive. I was too young to see the movie but I loved looking at that poster, imagining who might have been the one to live and what could have happened to the others. House on Haunted Hill is like finally getting to see that movie I imagined in my mind.
(
out of four)
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