House on Haunted Hill (1999)

I appreciate that this movie, produced by Robert Zemeckis, comes from a place of love.  Zemeckis is a big fan of William Castle, the producer and director of a number of films in the 1950s through the 1970s that were often quite fun to watch even if the selling point was often a corny gimmick.  House on Haunted Hill, released in 1959 and starring Vincent Price as a millionaire offering ten thousand dollars apiece to a group of strangers to spend the night in a supposed haunted house, was one of his best.

A selling point on the original, other than to see a plastic skeleton fly over the audience toward the end when it emerges from a vat of acid on screen, was that the haunted house and the ghosts were a background story.  There are never any ghosts seen nor do any of the characters interact with any.  There are frightening looking servants and people pretending to be spirits, but despite the owner's insistence that they exist, that part of the movie is left up to the viewers' imaginations.  It is unfortunate that director William Malone and screenwriter Dick Beebe didn't do the same.

Richard Price (Geoffrey Rush) is a billionaire amusement park tycoon with a wife, Evelyn (Famke Janssen), who is eager to get her hands on his fortune.  Her birthday is coming up and she decides throw a party at a place called Haunted Hill, which is really an old insane asylum that was run by a Dr. Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs) in the 1930s.  He did unspeakable experiments on the patients until they rebelled, killing the staff and setting the place on fire.  The house is owned by Vannacutt's grandson Pritchett (Chris Kattan) who believes it is alive and will try to kill the guests.

Despite Evelyn making a list of her friends Richard decides to make a list of his own, which is itself changed by unknown hands.  Besides Pritchett it includes a former baseball player named Eddie (Taye Diggs), a production assistant named Sara (Ali Larter), down-on-her-luck television host Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) and physician Dr. Blackburn (Peter Gallagher).  Each guest is offered a million dollars if they can survive the night, which soon turns out to be quite difficult as Pritchett may be right and the former residents of the asylum may have stuck around.  Besides that, there are some mortal hands at work as well. 

It makes no sense that the ghosts were made manifest in this as a large part of the movie follows the original.  The names are all changed, as well as some of the professions, but they are all pretty much the same characters, with Ali Larter and Taye Diggs being the main heroine and hero, while Geoffrey Rush is set up as a possible villain.  The location is different, as is the set-up at the beginning, but until the ghosts appear and derail the film it's Robb White's script given a modern veneer.

As can be predicted any movie with both Ali Larter and Chris Kattan is not going to be that good, as they were red flags for any movie from around the late 1990s to the early 2000s.  Peter Gallagher is like a poor man's Jeff Goldblum and, even worse, Jeffrey Combs just has a walk-on non-speaking part.  Geoffrey Rush is the only one who seems to be having any fun.  While the last name Price was an obvious homage to Vincent, the look of the character being similar to the late actor was accidental, as Rush was trying to look like John Waters in order to liven up what I'm sure he knew was a dire script. 

What the audience gets is a desire to be watching the original 1959 version while being tortured by Marilyn Manson's version of "Sweet Dreams".  It's fitting that song was included, since Manson made a career of trying too hard to be scary while ripping off the personas and ideas of better artists that came before.  That is exactly what this movie does.  Instead of being a loving tribute to a classic horror film it turns out to be a tepid retread with a few tired modern ideas sprinkled on top.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Time: 93 minutes

Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras

Director: William Malone