House On Haunted Hill ::: Reviews
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
After months of anticipation, ``House on Haunted Hill'' sneaked into town yesterday like a movie with something to hide. No sneak previews, no screenings for critics, nothing but the picture, showing up in theaters all over the Bay Area.
It's an adaptation of the William Castle film of the same name, a B-movie from 1958 that was originally exhibited with skeletons dropping down from the ceilings of theaters. In the Castle film, a group of people were gathered together in a haunted house, with the agreement that anyone who lasted the night could have $10,000.
The new version uses that same premise, but raises the prize to a million. Chalk up the increase to a few factors: Inflation. A booming economy. And the naive faith that making something 100 times bigger automatically makes it better.
``House on Haunted Hill'' was produced by Robert Zemeckis (director of ``Forrest Gump'') and di rected by William Malone, the auteur responsible for ``Scared to Death'' and ``Creature,'' two films I unaccountably missed. On the basis of the new picture, Malone is one those horror directors who doesn't try to scare the audience by building a mood, but by threatening, at any given moment, to show something really disgusting.
So in the opening sequence, a flashback to 1931 that tells how the house got haunted in the first place, we are treated to the sight of a doctor operating on a man's stomach without anesthetic. Minutes later, another man is stabbed to death with a pencil through the neck, all the way through and out the other side.
Then there is the fellow with his face chewed off -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, ``House on Haunted Hill'' is the kind of horror movie that's not a bit scary and quite a bit gross. Yet it's also mildly, even pleasantly, entertaining, at least by the diminished standard set by this summer's ``The Haunting.''
It's better than ``The Haunting'' probably because its budget was smaller. In ``The Haunting'' everything was invested in the house, which was an impressive piece of set creation, and the special effects, which swamped the movie. ``The House on Haunted Hill'' at least has some lively characters.
Geoffrey Rush plays an amusement park owner who specializes in providing perverse thrills. An early scene, in which he shows a TV reporter his latest roller coaster, is the most effective in the movie. The reporter, incidentally, is played by pop singer Lisa Loeb.
Rush is a jovial, smirking sadist married to a woman only a masochist could love. Famke Janssen is the wife, a Linda Fiorentino- style femme fatale who decides to have her birthday in a haunted facility where an evil doctor and his mental patients died in a fire in 1931. She's a gal who knows how to have fun.
The two invite a doctor (Peter Gallagher), a former baseball player (Taye Diggs), a former game- show hostess (Bridgette Wilson) and a production assistant (Ali Larter). Larter and Wilson look alike, and the movie deals with that problem efficiently.
``House on Haunted Hill'' sets up hostile relationships between the characters, which allows the audience to wonder who is doing what to whom. Finding out is not so interesting, but getting there isn't so bad.
Brenda Sokolowski, Anchorage Press
Cruel, torturous experiments were conducted on the inmates of a former hospital for the criminally insane, ending in a fiery death for all. Now, 40 years later, their spirits are pissed off — go figure.
But the obvious is a staple of horror films. Here, a small group gathers to spend the night in this haunted house, ostensibly to collect $1 million each; of course, that’s just a ruse so that we can watch people gruesomely murdered. Geoffrey Rush, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher and Famke Janssen star in this slow, death-by-numbers remake of a 1958 horror classic.
It was schlock then, and it’s schlock now. Yet while it’s dumb, it is spooky, which saves it from a “Don’t Bother” rating in my book. It begins promisingly, as an amusement park operator (Rush) takes reporters for a ride with hair-raisingly unexpected consequences. Once the movie settles into the creaky house, however, we immediately recognize it as having more sense than the people gathered there.
Mike McGranaghan, The Aisle Seat
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.
Ian Waldron-Mantgani, UK Critic
William Castle was one of the great showmen of cinema, a creator of cheesy horror features who once said he modelled his career on that of P.T. Barnum. The gimmicks Castle used to market his films would make a good movie in themselves -- he once, for example, arrived at one of his premieres in a coffin, delivered by a hearse.
Far more characteristic for Castle were mechanical tricks such as 'Percepto', whereby people would get a signal that a monster was loose in the auditorium, and the only way to kill it was to scream. His 1958 film "House on Haunted Hill" boasted 'Emergo', a system of fitting theatres with huge plastic skeletons that would jump out on unsuspecting members of the audience.
It is probably impossible to recapture Castle's unique brand of stunt-orientated entertainment for today's moviegoers. Gone are the days when cinemas would consider letting you fit seatbelts or electro-shock buzzers in their seats, and it's doubtful that savvy modern kids would respond to B-movies as enthusiastically as youngsters did in the 1950s.
The new remake of "House on Haunted Hill", which has been directed by William Malone and produced by Hollywood giant Joel Silver, is an admirable if not completely successful attempt to get into the spirit of Castle's genre. It has few ironic references, and most of the actors don't go to great lengths to point out that their tongues are in their cheeks -- the movie really does play like an attempt to scare us using grotesquely over-the-top atmosphere and fairground techniques. We only know the filmmakers aren't that stupid because we trust nobody would ever expect us to take this schlock seriously.
The characters are a goofy bunch, perfunctorily thrown together in accordance with some hack screenwriter's manual. You've got a dumb blonde (Bridgette Wilson) and a smart one (Ali Larter); a cheap, goofy loser (Chris Kattan) and an affluent professional (Peter Gallagher); and a wise-cracking tough guy (Taye Diggs), who also happens to be the token black character, as all the others are white and there isn't really room for anyone else. These kids find themselves invited to a spooky mansion that used to be an asylum, by eccentric zillionaire Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush). He makes an offer of one million dollars... "To whoever can survive the night!"
Price is an innovator in theme-park design, you see, who loves his work and gets a kick out of scaring people in new and exciting ways. He has rigged the house with perilous gadgets galore in order to do this, too, but -- need I even say it? -- the house really does turn out to be filled with evil spirits, and all the characters find themselves fighting for their lives.
Rush gives a good performance here, with a sly, trailing voice that is perfect for relishing his odd, playful lines -- his character is the kind who, if asked whether a phone call is business or pleasure, would give a twisted grin before responding "Neither... it's my wife!" He has a crazy little moustache that was grown to be twirled, and bushy eyebrows meant for raising. Rush is the only big star in the picture, and that's a nice touch, as Vincent Price had the same distinction, and the same role, in the original.
Other visual and aural treats arise from the haunting itself -- to be honest, a few of them really did creep me out in some basic, crude way. We see the passageways of the house as grimy, labyrinthine, ominous; the soundtrack manipulates the rear speakers brilliantly, giving us the sensation that sinister whispers, scratches and squeals are happening in the aisles of our screening room.
I was not as endeared by the human violence in the movie -- much of it is inappropriately gruesome, in contrast to the innocence of the supernatural gore. And the film never quite goes as far off the rails as it should -- those original B-movies, you will recall, resembled loud protests against refinement, craftsmanship and good taste.
Still, I'm impressed that the film is watchable at all. Remakes and horror movies are so hard to do right they're disaster areas for filmmakers, and embarking on a horror remake is like actively seeking public embarrassment. "House on Haunted Hill" was critically savaged in the States, where it was seen as a slapped-together attempt to cash in on Halloween. That's unfair -- it's a lot more sophisticated than the adverts suggest. I didn't exactly like it, but it's hard not to have some affection for it; no film that reminds me of dear old William Castle can be all that bad.
Berge Garabedian, JoBlo's Movie Emporium
I had a blast at this movie! It was pure, unadulterated fun set perfectly on the weekend of ghouls and goblins. It's funny because due to the lack of press screenings by the studio, I was convinced that soon after the film's slick opening credit sequence, the other shoe would eventually fall off. So I waited and waited and waited, but never a shoe did fall. The film began on a campy B-movie feel and kept going strong with enough blood, gore, creepiness and thrills to give me a haunted woodie. The soundtrack also drew another one of my thumbs up, as well as the main over-the-top performance from the Vincent Price-esque Geoffrey Rush. And unlike THE HAUNTING, this film didn't waste any time to get going, and resorted to very few CGI special effects, and even then, only in the last twenty minutes or so. I'll admit that the special effects and the ending were this film's weakest links, but all in all, it kept me interested, creeped out, full of energy and believe it or not, guessing...the whole time!
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