Hold still, dear, you’ve got a little *DEATH* on your face…

It’s a contest, of sorts. Billionaire amusement-park mogul Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush, Pirates of the Carribean) offers his guests one million dollars (cue Dr. Evil impersonation)to spend the night in a deserted and supposedly haunted asylum for the criminally insane. It’s not his idea — that credit has to go to his young, bored, and scheming wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen, X-Men); they’re both trying to kill each other, and the haunted house makes a good cover. Sort of. If you’ve already seen the 1959 William Castle / Vincent Price original, then you probably already know the scheme. But one thing in this movie is very different; while in the original there were no ghosts, in 1999 there are ghosts aplenty.

I suppose it’s traditional — nay, compulsory! — to complain that the remake doesn’t live up to the brilliance of the original, but the original wasn’t that great either. Vincent Price almost always outclassed his material, and that was certainly true of the original production. Granted, in theatrical performances of the original, model skeletons were “flown” through the theater above the audiences heads on cue, something you can’t do at home, so I’m sure I missed some of the intended effect. But the fact remains that the original was a cheap horror film with a poor script and a half-realized idea. A little brushing up, updating, and re-imagining is certainly not out of line. Unfortunately, the William Malone remake could have stood a little more re-imagining, as it falters in the end towards easy clich�.

Blood!

Malone updated the original by updating the stock characters, strengthening some of the female roles, adding in ghosts, and leaning on grotesque Todd McFarlanesque character design. In the original film, the party / contest took place in a haunted house, the site of multiple murders. Apparently, however, run-of-the-mill mass murders fail to shock anymore, so the new location is an asylum run by the evil and sadistic Dr. Vannacutt (Jeffery Combs, Re-Animator), who tortured inmates to death under the guise of scientific research. All that torture, death, and insanity as infused the location with an elemental evil that threatens to destroy each and every one of the guests in the house.

With more complex characters, better plot, and far better acting from the likes of Janssen, Ali Larter (_Final Destination_), and Chris Kattan (_Undercover Brother_), House on Haunted Hill has a lot of potential. Heck, the twitchy and cartoonish Chris Kattan alone makes the film worth the price of the rental, and almost makes up for Geoffrey Rush’s Animatronic-Vincent-Price performance, a horrible piece of almost-mimicry that brings the film down several notches any time he’s on screen. I blame the director for this; from the character name (Vincent Price’s character was named “Frederick Loren” in the original) to the pencil-thin-mustache, it’s obvious that Rush has been told to play Vincent Price playing Stephen Price instead of letting Rush find his own footing in the role. One of the extras in the film sets Price scenes up against Rush; Rush comes out looking quite a bit worse. Janssen, however, plays Price’s condescending, greedy wife far better than Carol Ohmart. Like Vincent Price, Janssen far outclasses the material.

I’m not really a Vincent Price, but I play one on TV.

In the original film, Frederick Loren uses gadgets and trickery to scare his guests and threaten his wife. There are fake hangings, skeletons on wires, grotesque mannequins on tracks and secluded vats of acid. But the asylum lends itself to more disturbing medical instrumentation. Electro-shock therapy, surgery tables, bone saws, and oceans of blood. It’s hard to tell sometimes if Malone’s goal is to scare us to death or nauseate us. The House is supposed to be a character itself, but it’s entirely unpredictable. In real life, of course, this would be terribly frightening. But in a movie it feels like the director is just leaping out at you going “boo!” with a variety of different scary masks. That’s not scary, that’s dull. And when the Spirit of the House finally manifests, it’s an enormous letdown. Not only is it a poor special effect, it doesn’t fit in with anything else we’ve seen the house do. And that takes us right up to the cheap ending.

So yeah. The 1999 remake is better than the original. But that’s not saying much.

Haunted? This cheerful place? I don’t believe it!