Back in 1959 the original version of “House on Haunted Hill” was a very B-grade, cheap movie, with only two aspects of it worth watching. One is Vincent Price, and the second is the relationship of the couple, where their hatred of each other has vitriol positively dripping off the screen. As such, the remake did not have stiff competition and is easily a better movie. This does not make it a good movie, however.

Geoffrey Rush stars in the main role previously taken by Price, and his character is called Price in this, the name as well as Rush’s appearance and acting a clear homage to the original. He is suitably smarmy in the role, and so quite enjoyable to watch. The relationship of Mr and Mrs Price, while mirroring the hatred between them of the first movie, does not pack the same punch as the first movie in my opinion, though still quite amusing to watch. Evelyn Price insists on telling everyone that her husband is responsible for everything that is going on. He runs amusement parks which are known for frightening special effects, so this is not an unreasonable thought. Also we discover later on that he has secreted one of his effects technicians into the house, so apparently he was planning on doing something to scare the visitors. The technician tells him he has had nothing to do with what is going on, and even then Price just assumes his wife has engineered things. The couple’s hatred of each other is so intense that they go on blaming each other until it is too late.

The house where the characters are trapped is an old insane asylum, haunted by its previous inmates who died in a fire. The haunted asylum idea is a pretty cliché one, but this handles the idea reasonably well. The supernatural presence in the house appears to be extremely powerful – it is responsible for the guest list being changed to people who (spoilers) are the descendants of staff who worked at the asylum and helped in torturing the patients. This is problematic as a driving plot point – how did it know who was holding the party before they had arrived, as the house owner who rented it to them didn’t live on the premises any more; how did it know where to find the people it wanted; it manifests telekinetic power, the ability to appear as one of the characters, and a very concrete hands on approach to murder, so why did it not draw the people there earlier to ‘consume’ them (or even just kill them where they were)? Even more bizarrely, we later learn that one of the characters that the ‘house’ apparently chose, is known to the wife. This aspect of the plot does not really hold together.

The cast are solid. Famke Janssen does well as the conniving wife Evelyn. Chris Kattan as Pritchett is interesting – he plays the traumatised owner of the house very well, moving between sardonic, fatalist, and scared. Jeffrey Combs is the ghostly Dr Vannacutt, the long-dead psychiatrist who conducted horrific experiments on his patients and was killed by them. He achieves a truly creepy presence. The rest of the cast do their best, but I would say the script is flawed in that their characters are not really fleshed out.  

There are some genuinely spooky moments. There is a woman who is filming in the basement, and sees people operating on someone on her camera screen. She looks up and, of course, there is no one there, as the place has been abandoned for a long time. She looks back at the screen and can see them again, and then … they all turn to look at her. This was genuinely creepy, and as that was the end of her (you don’t even find out what happened to her until near the end of the movie, and it’s not pretty) I found it a pretty creepy moment.

When the malevolent spirit that is at the core of the problem finally manifests itself, it is only at this point that Price finally realises his wife is not behind everything. She realises the same thing about him, just before she gets absorbed (eaten? digested?) by the thing. It’s very shadowy and fragmented in appearance, though I tend to feel that this was probably a better option than a more solid critter. It also enhances the notion that it is some kind of gateway or door to hell or something similar. It speaks in the voices of the dead, or maybe it is a conglomeration of the dead spirits, and it is clear that there is no fighting it, escape being the only option if you don’t want to die. (More spoilers) Of course, in the original version, the ghosts weren’t real. While I was watching I was expecting that it would be Price, or his wife, or some third party (after all, we’d seen someone replace the guest list) causing all the spooky stuff. But no, it was really ghosts this time. But how do the final survivors actually escape? Well, I won’t spoil that – suffice it to say, it is VERY corny and is a disappointing way to end the movie.

“House on Haunted Hill” is not a good movie. It only manages to achieve superiority to its original because the original is so bad. It’s the type of film you watch to kill a couple of hours, but is not special enough to stay in your memory long. It is mildly entertaining at best.