Jul 111999
 
two reels

A wealthy, amusement park owner, Stephen H. Price (Geoffrey Rush), in an unhappy marriage with his unfaithful wife (Famke Janssen), decides to have her birthday party in a closed insane asylum where atrocities took place.  However, the guests (Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan, Ali Larter, Bridgette Wilson) were chosen not by him, but by the house.

Quick Review: 1999s second FX extravaganza remake of a haunted house movie (The Haunting is the other), The House on Haunted Hill is slickly crafted, B-movie schlock in an A-movie wrapper.  The cast is filled with competent second tier actors, who are underused by a script that demands mainly screaming and frowning (but they do a good job of that).  Unlike its competitor, there are some creepy moments, particularly when visions of the past appear on video screens.  The setup supplies many possible mysteries.  With the Price’s failing marriage, any strange occurrence could be the result of ghosts, or could be one of them trying to get at the other.  However this bogs down the middle of the film, once it is obvious that there are malignant spirits everywhere.

Horror film clichés are in abundance.  The group keeps splitting up.  That’s reasonable early on, but absurd later.  They meander around the lower levels because that’s what victims do, and die one by one, alone.  And they are nothing more than victims as there is no character development.  I’m less troubled by those shortcomings than by ghosts that can access a laptop and change documents via the phone line (which apparently the ghosts do).

The film starts much like the 1959 version but varies considerably in its second half.  The millionaire is named after Vincent Price, the star of the first.

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