House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Film Title: House on Haunted Hill

Released: October 29, 1999

Directed by: William Malone

Written by: Dick Beebe based on a story by Robb White

Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan, Ali Larter, & Bridgette Wilson

Plot: An eccentric tycoon offers $1,000,000 each to five strangers if they stay in a haunted house overnight and survive to tell the tale.

IMDb: 5.6/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 27/100

My Score: 2.5/5

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

House on Haunted Hill is an expanded remake of the 1959 William Castle classic of the same name. It was the first film from Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company started by Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler, with the intention to remake Castle's films for a new generation. Geoffrey Rush is an amusement park tycoon who throws a birthday party for his antagonistic wife Famke Janssen in a haunted house that used to be an insane asylum. Each of the five guests attending is offered $1,000,000 each if they can stay alive until morning. Needless to say, very few actually do. While the film pales when compared to the original, it succeeds in a number of places on its own merits. For instance, the opening scene with the fake elevator crash is a nice little freak out moment. The effects are high quality, too, but one would expect nothing less from KNB. The performances throughout are decent, with Rush and Janssen in constant competition to see who can chew up more scenery, but the standout performance for me was Chris Kattan as the overly nervous owner of the house. On the downside, the photography often becomes jarring and shaky with sweeping, tilting camera moves. I understand that this is supposed to correlate with the psychological state of the actors in the horrific scenes in which it occurs but its comes off as kitschy and is distracting. The major fail for me, though, was how the film takes the supernatural route. The first film worked so well because everything that happened was staged in order to cause panic among the guests for nefarious means. This version, however, retains most of the plot elements from the original, including the adulterous wife and her secret lover scheming to kill her husband, but in the end there is a darkness, an evil that actually exists and succeeds in killing just about everyone. This one deviation takes away the main element of what made the original so good. Musician Lisa Loeb, James Marsters and one of my favorite characters actors, Jeffery Combs, co-star. Peter Graves also briefly appears as himself hosting a television series called "Terrifying But True!!" At the 2000 Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, Taye Diggs won for Best Supporting Actor - Horror and Janssen was nominated for Best Supporting Actress - Horror.