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HOUSE
ON HAUNTED HILL
PLOT
Four people are invited to an old asylum, if they stay alive
during a night in the house they will be rewarded with one
million dollars. Price, the owner of the most infamous thrill
park in USA, is the host of the night, but when things start
to go wrong and seven people are locked inside the house, Price
realises that he's no longer in control over what's going to
happen this night... the house is.
REVIEW
This is a remake of the 1958 horrormovie with the same title.
While not having seen the original, you can tell that it was
a good movie since this is simply amazing. It feels a bit
unfair to give a remake 4 stars, but I can't help loving this,
even if many people despise this. The movie is genuinely creepy
and the suspense is always very high. I'm sick of these new
high budget movies with too much effects in them, Thirteen
Ghosts and Lord Of The Rings being two of them, but in this
the effects really work as they always look very realistic,
especially one scene where a girl goes around filming and
she comes to this room and she looks into the camera and a
doctor is surging a patient, she looks outside the camera
and the doctor isn't there, very creepy.
Geoffrey Rush replaces Vincent Price very well and he is
indeed a brilliant actor. Beautiful Ali Larter is as always
a very good actress and gives us an incredible performance
as the clever Sara Wolfe. The directing is also very creepy
and suspenseful and as I said before, the camera scene is
amazingly well done.
This is a movie that you can just watch over and over and
over and over... and over again. But what disappointed me
was the very unbelievable ending, as in many other films.
You can tell that it's the same people that made The Haunting,
Thirteen Ghosts and Ghost Ship since there are many factors
that are similar in all movies, this one being the best of
them though. First time I watched this I hadn't heard of it
before (believe it or not), I just found it in my local
video store one day and decided to rent it, so I was very
pleasantly surprised, maybe Dark Castle should focus on
making more of these good movies than movies like Ghost Ship.
GORE
Quite gory indeed, one gets some pens impaled through the
neck, we also have some bloody scalpel stabbings, a quite
gory electrocution, a dismembered head, one loses the face,
we also get some very weird disfigured corpses.
SOUNDTRACK
The soundtrack is also quite creepy and works incredibly well
to create just the right atmosphere for this movie. We get
a cool gothic-like version of Sweet Dreams, some more rock and
a cool creepy tune, which was also used in the Homecoming
version of Halloween 8 but was later removed for the cinema
release, good choice.
BOTTOM LINE
Even if I haven’t seen the original, I'm almost certain that
this lives up to it, really creepy, and for the time this
was made, very original. Cool effects and a really good story
kept this movie from becoming another bad ghost story created
by Hollywood. The ending is the only disappointment in the
movie but still this is very much worth more than one watch.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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