The House on Haunted Hill

The House on Haunted Hill is about 8 people who spend the night in a Haunted House. Sound familiar? If not, be patient and I'll tell you why it should be. These eight people are Amusement Park mogul Steven Price and his wife, who hates him. Five People invited to the House, and the caretaker of the house, itself.

The House isn't even really a house, it's a derelict Asylum for the Criminally insane, where, in the 30's, an inmate rebellion broke out, and they started killing everyone. Dr. Vannecutt threw the switch which threw the Asylum into Lockdown mode, and then a fire broke out. With no way to escape, the inmates, and all but five of the Doctors die.

Skip forward to the Nineties. Ms Price wants a birthday party in the house, and she tells her husband this. He arranges it, and even writes up her Guest list on his Mac G3 Computer (same as I am). The house has other ideas though. The evil energy of the House apparently has the ability to travel through Phone Lines, and it hacks it's way into Price's Computer, and changes the guest list to the five descendants o te dctors who survived the carnage of the 30's.

Everyone shows up at the house, and then the house throws itself into lockdown, so no one can escape. Two of them wander down into the cellar, where the torturous workings of the Drs used to go on, trying to find a reset switch for the lock down.

One of them dies a horrible bloody death, with a lot of screaming and flailing. Unperturbed by this, more of them decide to wander down into the basement, and as the death toll mounts, they don't realize that the proper thing to do is to STAY OUT OF THE BASEMENT.

In the end, all but two of the people die, and they are left in an extremely precarious position when the movie ends.

This movie, though not one of the worst I've seen (see Blue Streak for that honor) was pretty bad. It was basically a rehash of The Haunting. Especially when you consider this: The Haunting was based on a book by Shirley Jackson called "The Haunting of Hill House." This movie is called "The House on Haunted Hill."

There is a lot of Deus ex Machina in this movie, one character who dies three times, I think, before staying dead for good, one Character who dies at least two, and maybe as many as four times before dying for good, and really the only scary thing about it was how obvious it was who was going to survive the night.

This was basically a rehash of The Haunting, but with more gore, more guts, more cursing, and less plot. I give it Two Field Mice.

And, as always, Ebert can have the balcony, those Sneak Previews guys can have the Aisle Seats, I want the exact middle!