House On Haunted Hill [DVD] [1999]

Product Description ------------------- Haunted house horror remake starring Geoffrey Rush. Decades after inmates at the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane were killed during a revolt against the cruel regime, tycoon Stephen Price (Rush) hires the building to throw a ghoulish birthday party for his wife, Evelyn (Famke Janssen). He invites a select group to the house, offering one million pounds to anyone who can survive the night. However, events turn sinister when the man employed by Price to create a series of creepy special effects is killed in an accident. Meanwhile, Evelyn's plan to murder her husband and inherit his fortune backfires as the tormented spirits of the former patients return to exact a terrible revenge on their guests... .co.uk Review ------------- House on Haunted Hill is one of the new breed of waste-no-time thrill machines, like Deep Blue Sea, and a particularly effective example at that. The plot is pure contrivance: For a party stunt, a wealthy amusement-park manufacturer (Geoffrey Rush) offers five people a million dollars if they spend the night in a former insane asylum where the patients murdered the sadistic staff. But it turns out the five people who arrive aren't the five he invited--did his wife (Famke Janssen), who hates him, make the switch? From there events unfold with a smart combination of human and supernatural machinations; spooky jolts are dispensed at regular, but not entirely predictable, intervals. The visual effects owe a considerable debt to Jacob's Ladder, a much more ambitious movie; House on Haunted Hill just wants to get under your skin, and succeeds more than you'd expect. Rush is his entertainingly hammy self; Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter and Bridgette Wilson are attractive and reasonably straight-faced about it all; and Chris Kattan is genuinely funny as the house's neurotic owner. Some elements of the plot seem to have been lost in the editing process, but it hardly matters. More bothersome is that the es go flat when computer effects take over at the end--the digital images just aren't as creepy as the more suggestive stuff that came before. But that's just the very end; most of the movie has a lot of momentum. Watch until the end of the credits for a final bit of eeriness. --Bret Fetzer, .com

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