Haunting Incompetence.

It’s not the fact it’s a remake of the Vincent Price comedy HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL from 1959; it’s not the fact the ghosts are real now, instead of manufactured by the unbalanced host; it’s not even the fact Chris Kattan is here, who, on an acting scale of Chris O’Donnell to Gary Oldman – is a Minus Rob Schneider.

It’s everything! Sometimes a movie just lacks any shred of substance, any dollop of dignity, any whisper of watchability. With its insufferable, vapid performances, absurd character reactions, scattershot continuity, slipshod editing, unsuitable soundtrack, and supposedly eerie atmosphere that five-year-olds would laugh at as Halloween kitsch, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is so bad it makes Chris Kattan look like Hayden Christensen Adjacent.

The – ahem – skeleton of the tale remains the same: that of a millionaire who invites five strangers to a supposedly haunted house, offering them one million dollars each if they survive the night. At first, the guests think it’s a lark, until The House reveals itself to be sentient, seals them in and tries to kill them with visions, psychological trauma and bad screenwriting.

As homage to the original, the millionaire’s name is Price (Geoffrey Rush). His entitled, gold-digging snob wife Evelyn is Famke Janssen. The subplot of Price trying to kill his wife amidst the fracas is unnecessary, because in the original, this plot element sat snugly within the context of the millionaire making it look like ghosts were trying to kill everyone. But here – the ghosts are real. So there’s no need for the extra evil of Price. What’s the great Geoffrey Rush doing in this buttock scab anyway? Though the original has dated badly, Vincent Price played his role with a wry wink, whereas Rush plays it straightforward Captain Barbossa homicidal.

The guests are Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, and two blondes hard to tell apart due to their lack of talent being almost identical, Ali Larter and Bridgette Wilson. Chris Kattan is the caretaker who keeps warning them, “It’s the house that’s doing this! It’s the house that’s doing this!” but no one believes him because he’s Chris Kattan. And no one is sure whether he is trying to act funny and not succeeding, or trying to act serious and not succeeding – kinda like his time on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

For no good reason, this remake adds oodles of backstory to the house: previously a mental asylum where the insane doctor (the inimitable Jeffrey Coombs in flashbacks) conducted horrific experiments on his patients, those patients eventually overrunning the facility. Even if screenwriter Dick Beebe had kept the story as linear and ludicrous as Robb White’s 1959 version, TV director William Malone was intent on turning the whole affair into a curdled mess, the only “sense” emerging when Larter identifies the five guests as descendants of the cruel asylum staff. And the House – not Price – invited them, to take its revenge. The rest of the movie is people running down dark corridors, spastic room-shaking, tilted angles, blood vats, roaring soundtrack, sweaty explosions and basso-voiced entities.

Except for the House trying to kill these people (and by the second act, we’re rooting for the House), there is no rationale for anything in the story – the offer of money is ludicrous and we cannot comprehend how Price will benefit from paying it out, or even how he might profit if the guests die and he doesn’t have to pay it out. Has he warned the authorities he is hosting a party where people might get murdered gruesomely? If so, would he be a suspect, or has he paid off the authorities not to look into the deaths too closely? How do you know this victim? You don’t? What were they doing at this party before they were killed? You invited them? Oh, it wasn’t you, it was the house? Sir, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will…

Remade in the same year THE HAUNTING was remade, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL reeks of Hollywood copycatting, suffering from the same rancid fate as that other remake. The nineties, when filmmakers forgot how to do horror and thought their new-fangled “computers” would make up for their filmic incompetence. And if their digital incompetence didn’t truly scare you, there was always Chris Kattan.

END

Comedic Horror or Horrible Comedy?

Fade in on black. A woman’s scream pierces the blackness; the type of screechy eyeball-rattling scream that is so annoying it makes you NOT want to save the woman…

So opens the haunted house horror-comedy HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, the most terrifyi— wait, is the house haunted or is it the hill? Cos if it’s just the hill that’s haunted, well, why are we blaming the poor house? Just saying…

Vincent Price‘s floating head appears and narrates the premise, and his fey performance as millionaire Frederick Loren makes us wonder whether this movie was meant to be a black comedy. He tells us he is offering $10,000 each to five strangers who will spend the night at this house he has rented for his wife to throw a “haunted party.” Immediately, I don’t get it. What is his motive to pay the guests, unless it’s some kind of challenge to stay through some actual haunting? Even then, what’s in it for him to pay them? Does he get publicity, back-end points on some other property – what? What is his wife’s connection to the money? What will she gain if the people stay the night and Loren pays them? Loren tells us that if they die during the night, their next of kin are paid, which means he’s out $50,000 no matter what. The only person who’s being haunted here is his accountant.

The guests arrive in funeral cars: a pilot (Richard Long, smugly Brylcreemed), a writer (old Julie Mitchum, with her handbag riveted to her forearm as if she’s wandering a sale at Macy’s), a doctor (Alan Marshal, looking like George Raft), a drunk B-actor (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a young typist with a pointy bra (Carolyn Craig, from GENERAL HOSPITAL).

Loren’s wife is the stately Annabelle (Carol Ohmart, whose regal bearing reminds us of Meryl Streep, and whose acting reminds us she’s not), who disdains her husband’s wishes to host the party and who suspects he is plotting against her, as he did with his other 4 deceased wives.

B-actor gets his ghoulie on straightaway: “Only the ghosts in this house are glad we’re here.” I don’t even know how to start insulting or educating this mongoon. As one of John Cleese’s teachers once said, “The sad thing about true stupidity is that you can do absolutely nothing about it.”

Renowned B-movie director William Castle helms this rickety cliché, and writer Robb White pulls out every horror convention of the day: doors slamming by themselves, blood dripping from the roof, isolating people in basements, screams from other rooms, secret passageways, apparitions, lights being blown out, and people entering rooms by opening and closing doors. Lots of opening and closing of doors. I swear to god I’ve never seen a movie with this much opening and closing of doors! It’s like the director never trusted us to understand that if someone appears in a room, they must have used the door to enter. No, we’ve got to see them physically, either in establishing shot or cutaway, enter through the door and close it behind them, as if being neat and tidy! Even when Pointy Bra is screaming her head off, she runs out a door and closes it behind her!

Oh, and did I mention there’s a giant pit of acid in the middle of the basement? No one’s gonna fall or trip or be pushed into that – no way! (So the house has been unoccupied for years since the murders took place here, so who has maintained this giant pit of acid all these years? And – WHY maintain a giant pit of acid in an unoccupied house? Wouldn’t it be more sane to DRAIN the giant pit of acid just for the sake of safety, or sell the giant pit of acid  to a school or lab?) The six-year-old who wrote this script must be old enough now for me to go over to his house and punch him in the head.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is one of those movies where things could go a whole lot smoother if people would just react like real people. For the sake of planting doubt that Loren might be trying to knock off Wife #5 – Annabelle – story is rife with red herrings and false leads. There is incessant talk of “ghosts” and deaths. But no one reacts to any situation remotely believably: if your life is threatened, don’t plan to “lock ourselves in our rooms and shoot anything that enters” – stay together in that gnarly old living room with all the lights on! If there’s an open pit of acid in the basement, firstly, close the frickin’ pit, then lock the basement and don’t go down there! Etc. Constant unrealistic behavior is augmented by hokey photographic effects and rudimentary “special effects” that badly date and ruin this movie which might have once been a tad chilling for boys and girls in 1950’s white Brylcreemed America.

Everyone is in suits that they just – won’t – take – off, and there’s much annoying high-pitched screaming from the dames. And there’s the blind caretaker who just decides to stand in a position like a dummy from Madame Tussaud’s in horror-movie-stance; we can forgive her that electroshock hairstyle (she is, after all, blind), but who exactly is she trying to impress by gliding across the floor with her hands clawed? And in all the opening and closing of doors, there’s Richard Long with the only adjoining door – aching to use his long richard on little miss Pointy Bra.

The twists in the plot are almost lost in the wooden shuffle between rooms, and opening and closing of doors. And there’s some insane stuff that involves either real magic or real ghosts – like the rope coming into the room and wrapping itself around Pointy’s legs by itself, while Meryl Streep floats outside Pointy’s bedroom window amongst the thunder and lightning. Best thing to do in a situation like this is to stand perfectly still and watch it happen, which she does, instead of running or even moving her legs a little, so as to let the special effects team get their job done.

The best/stupidest/funniest effect must surely be the skeleton rising up out of the acid to haunt Annabelle into tripping/jumping in. Poor thing must not have seen the wire attached to the top of its head pulling it up, like we could.

End of movie is completely inexplicable, because after Loren confesses to setting up all the scares in the house to murder his conniving wife, the Drunk does a bug-eyed camera-take and bemoans, “Next, they’re coming after me – and then they’re coming after you!” Who’re you talking about, dope – Vincent Price? Are you still blaming ghosts for the night’s fracas even after you just heard him fess up? “The sad thing about true stupidity…”

END