DEATH OF THE PARTY
HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL Directed by William Malone Screenplay by Dick Beebe With Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen UA South R 95 min.
Where was Wes Craven when we really needed him? "House on Haunted Hill", a gloss-and-guts remake of William Castle's 1958 horror flick, is left in the journeyman hands of William Malone ("Creature"). It starts with some nice campy fun, but it's designed as a thrill ride, and a 95 minute thrill ride gets long. Geoffrey Rush ("Shine", "Shakespeare in Love") reprises Vincent Price's role as a billionaire amusement park tycoon who rents a haunted house to throw a birthday party for his wife (Famke Janssen) and invites four guests to whom he puts this proposal: stay the whole night, stay alive, and leave in the morning with a cashier's check for a million bucks (oh, inflation; Price only offered $10,000). The joint is the former Vanacutt Institution for the Criminally Insane, a towering structure closed and haunted since a grisly inmate rebellion in the '31 left everyone within its walls horribly slaughtered. Now it's overseen by the nervous Pritchett (Chris Kattan), a descendant of the evil Dr. Vanacutt. But as soon as the four guests -- Eddie (Taye Diggs), a baseball player, Sara (Ali Larter), a pretty blonde executive, Melissa (Bridgette Wilson), a pretty blonde game show hostess, and Dr. Blackburn (Peter Gallagher) -- are assembled, along with their host and hostess, the house locks itself up tight as a drum, and there's no escape.
That's all you need to know about the characters. The movie concentrates on scaring them, not developing them. Mostly it lures them into the basement, a dank place packed with ghosts and grisly displays. It hacks them up, twists some back to life only to devour them again, crawls with creepy effects, and throws in a few random naked women when things threaten to get unbearably tedious. When Castle unveiled the original in '58 he had skeletons dropping from the ceiling and ambulances stationed outside. At the showing I saw at the UA South, the lights and the FM between-the-shows broadcast kept coming on during the movie. I don't know if that was a device or not. It was a little weird.
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