Movie Reviews

The House on Haunted Hill

10 Feb 2000

OK, you've won an Oscar for your acting, so you're hot stuff - but you're not exactly Tom Cruise, so what do you do? In Geoffrey Rush's case, you get "character" roles, which tends to mean that you use your substantial talent to play campy, over-the-top eccentrics. As he proved in Shakespeare in Love and Mystery Men, Rush is very good at this. In The House on Haunted Hill, he proves it again, playing an amusement-park mogul with a passion for scaring people witless.

Incidentally, this was NOT based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, about a group of strangers who agree to spend the night together in a haunted mansion. That was turned into a movie called The Haunting, released only a few months ago. THIS movie, however, is a remake of a 1958 Vincent Price movie, about five strangers who are offered $1 million to, er, spend a night together in a haunted mansion. See? Completely different film.

The Haunting was criticised for being, well, not scary. The House on Haunted Hill is also unlikely to terrify anyone (particularly today's audiences), but at least it's more fun.

"Fun" might seem a strange description of a movie whose storyline consists of most of the characters suffering gruesome deaths, but director William Malone (a veteran of cheap horror TV shows) emulates the high camp of the original, with better special effects. I haven't had this much fun at a horror movie since Deep Blue Sea (which was only last year, so don't get too excited), another film with an ever-decreasing cast.

Haunted Hill, like Deep Blue Sea, allows some capable actors to enjoy themselves. Famke Janssen, Peter Gallagher, Taye Diggs and Ali Larter are among them, competing in melodramatics with the dark set design, spooky music and Dick Beebe's cliche-mining script.

Even as parody, this film is not flawless. It occasionally misses a beat, and the structure is a mess. But consider the closing scene (which also echoes Deep Blue Sea): having witnessing everyone else's deaths, the survivors (and no, there aren't many) are NOT blubbering hysterically. Instead they laugh in relief, swapping one-liners.

There's something nice about movies that actually INTEND to be dumb...