The House on Haunted Hill

A modern remake of the classic 1958 horror film of the same name, the storyline is straightforward: Five strangers are challenged to survive the night in a supposedly haunted, abandoned insane asylum. The prize: $1 million dollars to anyone who survives. A fairly good scare flick, it features not a single homely person.

The plot begins with eccentric theme park tycoon Steven Price. He's a dead ringer for the venerable (and now dead) Vincent Price. He plans to hold his annual Halloween party at a condemned insane asylum. He drags his estranged wife, played by Famke Jannsen, along for the scare. When he arrives, he doesn't know any of the guests. Someone's changed his list of guests, somehow, and invited these fools instead.

A series of scary incidents occur, all of which point to their host (or his wife) as the culprit. It turns out that the house itself is alive; the myriad horrors and evils perpetrated in the asylum by an insane doctor have festered and combined into a horrific group consciousness. Deja vu from The Shining except in this case the consciousness actually takes on a physical form. The back story is hair-raising, and the movie keeps you on your toes, trying to determine whether the killer is the house, the host, or one of the guests.

My only beef in the whole film really, is the inclusion of Saturday Night Live alumni, Chris Kattan. I'm not sure if he's intended to be comic relief, or if he's really trying to act. I don't want to give it away, but he shows up the last few frames of the film in a really ridiculous way, that will make viewers groan. Before that time comes, his acting is bad enough to make fruit wither.

The House on Haunted Hill is definitely a good Halloween rental, with good scares and some interesting twists. The acting was just adequate, with everyone playing their assigned archetypes (annoying media hound, corporate ice queen girl, heroic black man, etc.) and the backstory is genuinely scary.