No cheap thrills. Genuine journey to the brink of madness.

 

It begins with a scream… of excitement from people on a roller coaster. This actually happens about 10 minutes into the movie, but it isn’t until here when the movie appears to start loosely making sense.

In 1931, Dr. Vannacutt did cruel experiments on the patients at an insane asylum hidden on top of the hill. These experiments were so bad that when patients finally found a way to break out of their cells, they fought against staff, killing and maiming everybody who had harmed them. The asylum would become known as “The House on Haunted Hill” (please note that this name has yet to make sense in either version of the film, and I understand less why it is used in this way here). 

Years later, to his wife’s wishes, amusement park mogul Steven Price (played by Geoffrey Rush, wearing a terrible mustache with hopes of looking like Vincent Price), holds a birthday party for her at the abandoned asylum. To the dismay of his wife (Famke Janssen), Price shreds her guest list, making his own. To Price’s dismay, before he can send invitations, his computer is hacked into, changing his own guest list, replacing it with people neither of the hosts is aware of.

Along with the house’s owner, Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan), the hosts are joined by Dr. Donald Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), struggling celebrity Melissa Margaret Marr (Bridgette Wilson), former pro baseball player Eddie Baker (Taye Diggs), and movie studio V.P. Jennifer Jenzen (Ali Larter). Each person is promised $1 million (gotta alter the plot for inflation) if they spend the night in the asylum and survive. If they don’t survive, their checks are divided between the remaining.

This extra stipulation is said as a joke, but as the night goes on, the reality is more than scary for these guests. Immediately upon starting the party the emergency gates come down around the windows and doors, sealing everybody from the outside, and keeping cell phone signals from working.

Unlike the original film, this time it is not merely the host’s wife and her lover setting ghostly traps for other guests. This means the party favor pistols won’t work as well as they had on the human spirits in the ‘50s. The house is alive, made stronger by the spirits of all who were murdered there over the years. Since this used to be an asylum with deadly experiments, there are a lot of vengeful spirits.

It turns out that each guest on the list were relatives of the original doctors at the asylum, and the house itself hacked into Price’s computer to lure them to the house. This is lost on many throughout the film (especially Baker, who isn’t even a blood relation), and easily forgotten by the audience when Price’s wife is found strapped to a table being electrocuted. It turns she has not actually been electrocuted, but instead has been given a drug to make her appear dead to everybody until her accomplice, Dr. Blackburn, can revive her. Price meanwhile is punished by both his suspicious guests and the spirits of the house.

In the end only two of the guests find their way out of the building by morning, each of the others having been murdered in a different way. Being made at this time in film history, the available special effects allow the new addition of “real” ghosts and actual “murder” (not in a fake pit of acid) to enhance the story. For me however, being shorter than the original, this remake focuses more on jump scares and different ways to murder a person than it does on moving the plot along. At one point in the movie I dozed off, waking up to see the next person bite the dust and learn that not much had happened in between other than exposition about the house that we already knew.

Despite the many recommendations I have received from friends about this film, I only give this 3 out of 5 stars. It incorporates the original plot well with the ghost factor, but relies too much on the ghostly drama rather than moving the story along. Perhaps this is a current B-movie trope itself that I often do not see, avoiding gory horror, but it was unnecessary in this instance.