House on Haunted Hill Movie Review 390

House on Haunted Hill is a 1999 horror remake directed by William Malone and starring Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Ali Larter and Peter Gallagher.

Steven Price(Rush) owns amusement parks and he has a dark humour. He is married to Evelyn(Janssen) who hates his guts. She wants to have a party for her birthday and she gives Steven her guest list. He decides to invite other people and he is having it at a haunted house which was once an asylum. The asylum had a very dark history with rumours of a Doctor Vannacutt, played by Jeffrey Coombs, performing awful experiments on the patients. The patients got their revenge and killed all of the staff and set the place on fire. The cruel doctor had booby trapped the place so that it shut down, trapping himself and the patients inside and doomed them to a horrible death. Price's guest list is somehow deleted by some unseen force and other people are invited instead.

When the people arrive, Price and Evelyn don't know who they are. They tell them that they were invited. Price offers each of them a million dollars if they stay the night in the haunted house. Price has some help from an employee of his. The employee is helping him to scare the guests. They all get locked into the house and they cannot leave. Price is surprised by this and he asks his pal why he did it. His man tells him that he didn't. Price wonders who it was who sealed the house. The guests are Sara Wolfe(Larter), Eddie(Taye Diggs), Melissa(Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), Dr Donald Blackburn(Gallagher) and the owner of the house Pritchett(Chris Kattan). Pritchett thinks that the house is haunted and he thinks that something bad is going to happen.

Of course with this movie, you can write the plot really. Things happen, people die. There are real ghosts there. Vannacutt turns up. Evelyn and Donald are lovers and conspire to kill Price but it backfires. It is also revealed that ghosts specifically invited the guests who are descendants of staff members from the asylum. They wanted to finish the job. The evil swallows Evelyn and it comes after the others. Sara, Eddie and Price are the only ones left. They try and escape the house. Price sacrifices himself so that they can get out and they do. They wonder how they will get down from the roof and they spot the million dollar cheques waiting for them. There is a post credits scene where Evelyn and Price are being tortured by the patients in the asylum as ghosts for eternity .

This film wasn't really great. I liked the original with Vincent Price, but this left me bored by the first hour. I didn't really like the movie at all. As a remake, it sucked. I just thought that it was not very good. It had plenty of gore, but not much substance. It gets a 3/10.