Now we are in 1999 and horror is making a huge come back. This is borderline renaissance period for horror. This is a remake of the Vincent Price movie I just reviewed a few days ago. This one is similar, only much edgier and modernized. Fun fact, they made a sequel called Return to House on Haunted Hill, which I own, and can tell you, it sucks BALLS, like worse than your mother after she’s had a few too many to drink. Ahhhh, mom jokes. May they never die. On to the movie.
This movie is stacked from a casting standpoint. You have Geoffrey Rush and Famke Jansen as Stephen and Evelyn Price, a shout out to Vincent Price obviously. Then you have among the houseguests, Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, Chris Kattan, Bridgette Wilson, and Jeffrey Combs. Oh and hell, even Lisa Loeb is a news reporter, you remember her for her hit single “Stay”, right?
We see lots of flashbacks of an asylum for the criminally insane, that eventually gets overrun by the inmates. Pure chaos and there’s some tits.
We have the news reporter and cameraman with Stephen Price at his amusement park. They get on an elevator, and things seem off, uh oh, the buttons aren’t working. It’s a free fall. Hahaha, it was all a joke. Next up is a roller coaster. It’s a pretty sweet ride, lots of upside-down parts. Suddenly the track comes apart, and the car in front of the reporter goes flying off. Complete panic mode and the operator tells Stephen that something isn’t right. Of course, the track comes back down, and the operator was talking about how one of the dummies in the car isn’t functioning right.
Evelyn is having a party, but the guest list gets changed. Ali plays Sarah, she’s the smart girl. Taye is for lack of a better term, your token black person, Eddie. Bridgette is the obnoxious girl obsessed with taking pictures and getting ahead, or giving head by any means necessary and her name is Melissa. Chris Kattan is in the classic role of Pritchett from the original, and he is pretty solid. Peter Gallagher plays Donald Blackburn who is a doctor. And we will see combs as a doctor from flashbacks.
Stephen dislikes Evelyn, as she is a straight-up whore who doesn’t love Stephen and is using him for his money, she’s a gold digger. He has grown to loathe her but loves to torture her.
So the deal is, you spend the night, and if you survive, by the time the sun comes up, you get a check for 1 million dollars. If somebody doesn’t last the night, their check gets divided up by the survivors. Pritchett immediately wants out. This place freaks him out. He is turning down the money. The doors and windows are activated to seal shut when the sun goes down and they unlock when the sun rises. Pritchett is now stuck in this forsaken place.
Back in 1931, when the asylum was overrun, Dr. Vannacutt, Combs, set the place on fire, and only 5 people survived as you couldn’t escape due to the doors and window situation. Pritchett’s dad owns this house, so that’s why he is terrified and believes that he is gonna die. So the idea is to go down in the maze of a basement, to the control room to try to open the doors.
A nice nod to the original, everybody has guns in a mini coffin that are supplied to them for protection. Sarah doesn’t want the gun, but Taye has no issues taking it. I could probably write 4 pages going through this movie, but the reality is, you need to watch it if you like haunted house movies, or stuff with asylums, and a sliver of a whodunit. We find out that Price has a guy in the control room who is setting up scares for the guests.
I personally love the detail to the asylum rooms. Asylums are and always will be creepy horror movie fodder. I’m shocked there hasn’t been a good big budget one in 15 years. That’s simply foolish. There’s the saturation chamber, a place that would drive a sane man mad, and a mad man sane. Probably my favorite thing period. I forgot to mention, they played Marilyn Manson’s Sweet Dreams early on. I will always love that song.
Sarah and Eddie end up splitting apart from Pritchett and Stephen. As Pritchett said, it’s a maze down here, so people easily split apart and lose one another. Eddie got sidetracked while Sarah kept talking. She ever retraces her steps to find him, nope she just keeps moving forward. Moron. Let the house start mindfucking everybody. Chris Kattan is a guy I don’t find particularly funny most of the time, there are exceptions, but he is really good here.
Another great creepy scene is when Melissa was exploring and looking through her video camera and sees a doctor and nurses operating on a person, but they aren’t there, only in the video camera, and they all slowly look at her. It was amazingly well done.
Well, some bad stuff happens to Evelyn, so they put Stephen in the chamber. The doctor is kind of a dick and turns on the chamber which causes one to see weird images, I can’t fully explain it. He put it on the highest intensity. It’s the best part for me. More boobs! 2 asses, that was great. More boobs! Redundancy is redundant.
Eddie finds a picture of the staff that was there when the place burned, and they are all descendants or at least the last names of the invited guests. We discover that the doctor’s last name is not on the picture. How odd. This is where I stop typing so damn much.
It ended, so let me wrap it up. I understand that some people may not be fond of the ending, and I simply want to ask, how many haunted house stories end without something being a little cheesy? It has to have something a little cheesy, but that doesn’t spoil the movie if it was done well and if it makes some sense. I liked the ending, it made sense, and the way it ends, it’s still kinda hopeless. I like that. I absolutely give this a 7.5. Not many movies capture a better aura or spookiness better than this. I would like to see more movies with newer technology tackle this properly. I would recommend this to anyone with interest in haunted houses or asylums. Oh, and watch after the credits, it’s worth it.
Final Rating: 7.5
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