Verdict: There's gore in them thar hill.
Details: Starring Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen and Taye Diggs. Rated R for horror violence and gore, sexual images and profanity. 1 hour, 55 minutes.
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Review: Like the fright houses people line up for this time of year, "House on Haunted Hill" is a loud assault on the senses. It's a (literal)
bloody mess. But as a meat-and-potatoes (or guts-and-eyeballs) scare machine, it has its moments.
Geoffrey Rush plays Price (a nod to Vincent Price, who starred in the 1958 version). He's an entrepreneur rich from theme
parks built on freak-out thrills. He invites five strangers for the birthday party of his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen, in full vamp
mode) in a house renovated from a 1930s hospital, site of mass murders. If they stay the night, and live, each wins $1 million.
(Chief among the group are the charming Taye Diggs and Chris Kattan, offering comic relief; the others are pretty much space
fillers till the butchery starts.)
Price has the place rigged for scares. Meanwhile, he and Evelyn are itching to off each other. Then there's the third problem:
The house has a mind, and starts to play brutal tricks of its own. In fine dumb-horror tradition, people wander around in the
dark by themselves and die horribly. Director William Malone cranks up the gruesome atmosphere and quick edits, in the
process sacrificing suspense for shocks, and even botching plot points on the way. (One character's name changes from
Jennifer to Sara, but the explanation is lost.) Like the house, the movie is just a big machine, but it generates a few moments of
dank creepiness in between the bits of explicit gore.
Like the year's overblown "The Haunting," real scares get tossed out the window at the end in favor of big computer-generated
ghost effects. But at least the phantom this mental hospital generates, in one of the film's occasional witty touches, resembles a
linty, creepy Rorschach inkblot.
— Steve Murray, Cox News Service
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House on Haunted Hill
