House on Haunted Hill (1999)

               In 1998 industry heavyweights Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler combined their powers and formed Dark Castle Entertainment. The purpose of the venture was initially to remake old William Castle movies for modern audiences. Their first two films were remakes of ‘House on Haunted Hill’ and ‘Thirteen Ghosts,’ but then they started turning out original material with ‘Ghost Ship’ in 2002 and ‘Gothika’ in 2004. All four of these movies are going to be included in my write-ups for this month so I might as well get familiar with the people doing this to me. They turned out some decently high-profile films over the years including Guy Ritchie’s ‘RocknRolla’ in 2008 and Shane Black’s ‘The Nice Guys’ in 2016. The company originally had a distribution deal through Warner Brothers but starting in 2017 they began working with other groups like Paramount Pictures and Shudder. In 2015 the company was acquired by OEG Inc. (formerly Oilers Entertainment Group, which owns the hockey team of the same name). They’re still in operation, premiering the Christoph Walz and Lucy Lui starring ‘Old Guy’ just a few days ago (as of the time of writing) and readying ‘Last Breath’ starring Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu for next year.

Not a Tool video, honest.

              Since this was the first movie from a fledgling production company, one that was created specifically with William Castle remakes in mind, they set up a promotional gimmick in a direct nod to his old antics. They handed out scratch-off tickets in the theaters for a chance to win a prize to match the one offered to the characters in the film. This was the only time they attempted something like this for their Castle remakes as they thought about releasing the ‘Thirteen Ghosts’ remake in 3-D with special themed glasses but ended up scrapping those plans.

              The cast is a case where one prominent hire kind of leads to the rest. First to be signed was Geoffrey Rush as Steven Price, the name a clear nod to the original movie’s Frederick Loren as played by Vincent Price. Aside from a pencil-mustache Rush doesn’t really ape any of Vincent Price’s looks or mannerisms, but he’s generally pretty good in this. He was in this weird place as an actor where fans of independent and art-house movies knew who he was but he wasn’t yet a household name. His wife Evelyn is played by Famke Janssen, fresh off of ‘The Faculty’ and still a few years from the X-Men movies. Her character is very one-dimensional, but she plays that one dimension well. The guests lured to the murderous birthday party include Taye Diggs as Eddie, Peter Gallagher as Dr. Blackburn, Bridgette Wilson as Melissa Marr, and Ali Larter as Jennifer / Sara. Taye Diggs is on record as only signing on because Rush did, the rest were likely just happy to be working. There’s also Chris Kattan as the owner of the ghost house Watson Pritchett, and my deepest shame about this movie is that I think he’s pretty good here. He’s ostensibly comic relief but per the director they just kind of let him perform however he wanted and while he’s occasionally over the top the note he hits most often is a sarcastic resignation to his doom.

              This movie keeps the same basic premise as the original: a rich husband and wife hate each other and invite a group of guests to a haunted house for a party with a cash prize if they can stay the night. In the original it’s $10,000, here it’s $1,000,000. The occasion is Evelyn’s birthday, which Steven is bound and determined to ruin. She gives him a list of people to invite which he promptly throws out. After he types up another list we’re shown as the haunted house itself apparently hacks his computer and replaces the original names with five different ones. It’s soon established as a plot point that the house doesn’t have a phone line, so of course later when the partygoers are wondering where the list came from they decide that the house must have accessed Steven’s computer through the phone line. So this is not a very tight script. It doesn’t help that huge chunks of the movie were torn out to get it down to an hour and a half, causing a ton of continuity errors and plot points that come out of nowhere or dribble off into nothing. This issue will come up again.

              The house is worth discussing. It’s odd in the original but here it’s just preposterous. It’s supposedly a former hospital that’s been remodeled into a private residence. Between ‘The Haunted’ and this nobody wants believable haunted houses anymore, they want architecturally impossible edifices. The movie establishes both the backstory of the house and it’s hard-R rating right at the beginning with badly-faked newsreel footage from 1931 showing a mad doctor performing heinous experiments at the insane asylum he runs. We see fully-awake patients being cut into, hordes of dirty inmates pressed up against windows, surly staff members, then it all goes bad and they riot. We see orderlies being murdered, nurses being stripped and sexually assaulted, then the footage ends and it’s revealed that it’s being shown as part of a low-rent true-crime tv show hosted by Peter Graves. There’s no way any of that footage would either exist or be released to the public so minus one point for that. But then plus one for including Peter Graves, so I guess I’m officially neutral on this part of the movie.

              One of the functions of Kattan’s character Pritchett is to drop lore about the house, which he starts doing fairly early on. He’s the grandson of the architect who designed the original hospital, which means he somehow inherited it. That’s not how it works, but we’re moving on. The hospital was abandoned and then partially converted into a residence. Given the dimensions of the building both in the establishing shots and with the interiors we’re shown the house would be about the size of a hospital, because that’s what it fucking is. They also didn’t bother to do any maintenance or repairs on anything below the main floor for the past sixty-eight years, nor did any of the medical instruments or displays used in the documented medial atrocities get taken into custody for evidence or disposal. It’s eventually revealed that all of the electroshock machines are still plugged in and the various torture implements are just scattered around the rooms, easily accessible to anyone. The original has a big pit of acid just sitting around the basement with a simple wooden lid on top, which is also stupid, but it pales in comparison to the amount of jagged machinery and mossy rubble scattered around everywhere.

              The first ten minutes or so are spent introducing us to the characters of Steven and Evelyn, and while neither of them are particularly nice people they’re not portrayed as monsters quite yet. We learn they’re rich, they hate each other, and for some reason Evelyn wants her birthday party to be at this haunted house. Since she was watching the Peter Graves program and calls Steven to tell him to book that place specifically, I guess technically they both have time to scope the place out. Certainly someone had to have access to decorate the place and set out the party favors, I guess the ghosts just didn’t end up having any beefs with them. I should mention that the party favors consist of five guns, and I’d complain about the difficulty in getting those but there are rich assholes involved so it’s fine.

              Soon enough we’re introduced to our five guests. The script is almost clever here. Since they were invited by the house for reasons that get revealed later neither Steven nor Evelyn know who any of them are and suspect the other of inviting them. In the case of Dr. Blackburn that’s almost certainly true as he’s later revealed to be her secret lover and thus he wasn’t invited by the house. Which raises some immediate questions, since presumably he was on Evelyn’s original list of guests which should be confusing for her since her husband tossed it, and if he wasn’t on the ghost’s list and thus didn’t get the same invitation as everyone else how was he going to explain his presence if Steven demanded to know why he was there? About halfway through some of the guests work out that the house invited the descendants of the five survivors of the massacre in 1931, but since it didn’t invite Blackburn that’s only four people. Did someone not have any kids? Did the others only have one descendant each? As hopefully becomes clear in this write up not a lot of careful thought was put into any plot points.

I'd party there.

              Within fifteen minutes everyone has arrived inside the house. By eighteen minutes Evelyn’s shrugged off very nearly getting killed by a spontaneously broken overhead window. By twenty-five we’ve established everyone’s personalities, we learn that the Prices really do hate each other and genuinely want each other dead, and that Steven has one of his tech guys in the basement monitoring the security cameras (he will factor into the movie in exactly one way, and that’s by the shock reveal of his corpse). Then at minute twenty-six something triggers the hospital’s old shutdown protocol and everyone is stuck inside overnight with no ability to leave. This is where they establish there’s no outside phone lines and there’s no cell reception. Roughly the next hour is taken up by people running around, yelling at each other, and occasionally dying.

              What seems to be the main character is Ali Larter as supposedly Jennifer Jenzen but secretly her former assistant Sara Wolfe. The way the film treats her ends up accidentally being a good illustration about how the inclusion or exclusion of scenes can drastically change a movie. Originally the movie had an additional scene before everyone arrives at the house featuring Debi Mazar as the real Jennifer Jenzen. She’s shown as a comically abusive film producer who receives the invitation and immediately afterwards fires Sara. Stung by her sudden unemployment, Sara reads the invitation detailing a chance to win a million bucks and decides to pretend to be her former boss. This is supposed to be an important plot point because that means that her character isn’t really a descendant of one of the original hospital survivors. You’d think this would keep the house from attacking her, but nope. Including this early scene would’ve primed the audience to see her as our viewpoint character as she’s not a member of the rich and famous. Instead, in the final version she just shows up along with everyone else and seems to randomly get more screen time. This cut also forced them to wrestle some b-roll and ADR lines into the form of a scene between Sara and Taye Digg’s Eddie where they can establish her real name. As far as I can tell he’s the only person she ever admits this to but don’t worry, everyone calls her Sara for the rest of the movie. Since that early scene with the producer was cut they also had to cut the post-credits stinger featuring a ghost luring the real Jennifer Jenzen to the house as it would no longer make sense, which is why Debi Mazar is just out of the film entirely.

              The last two-thirds of the movie is just people running around in various combinations and every once in a while people die. First Sara, Eddie, Steven, and Pritchard go down into the basement to look for a way to end the lockdown. This gives the production a chance to show off the spooky basement they built. There are all sorts of dead bodies on display, wires running over walls, dripping faucets, faulty lights, it’s a regular haunted house down there. Sara and Eddie get separated from the other two and she gets tricked by a ghost pretending to be Eddie into almost falling into a big vat of blood. Nobody’s that surprised that there’s an open vat of uncongealed blood. After a sudden cut everyone’s back upstairs and comparing notes. I’m not kidding when I say this film feels like it was severely hacked apart to get the time down far enough to squeeze in another showing per night. In fact, while discussing another cut scene involving Sara the director admits that the only reason it’s not in the final movie was that they had to get the length down. It would not surprise me that a full fifteen minutes at least was shaved off to get it closer to 90 minutes.

              Meanwhile Melissa is wandering through the basement looking for spooky footage. Either she went down there after everyone came back up or they just missed each other, it’s not important. The late 90’s really didn’t like ambitious women, so Melissa is portrayed as some kind of grasping fame whore for trying to scrounge up some footage to restart her tv career. Boy, the last twenty years have really done a number on what people do and don’t consider selling out, haven’t they? She’s got this bulky consumer grade camera that she has to hold at a weird angle because the entire back is a display screen. Looking through said screen she sees some doctors performing surgery on a screaming patient, but when she lowers the camera and looks herself they’re gone! She takes another look and we see the ghosts notice her and turn their heads to look right down the camera lens. It might be the only genuinely creepy moment in the film. Anywho she’s dead now and the rest find her camera in a pool of blood. Sara intones that the house must have taken her.

              Then a bunch more nonsense happens. Everyone has guns at this point and they start pointing them at each other. Steven goes down to check with his tech guy and finds that the front of his head has been scooped out. He never tells anyone this, by the way, so nobody but him is aware that anyone’s died for another few scenes. He spots the ghost of the evil doctor from 1931 on the security monitors and decides that his wife has hired someone to run around and kill people. I’m actually guessing about that, his actions don’t make a whole lot of sense from this point forward. The lights flicker and everyone makes it to the old electroshock therapy room at the same time to witness Evelyn’s supposed electrocution. Poor Famke Janssen really has to whip herself around in those restraints. After they manage to switch it off Blackburn confirms she’s dead. Steven whips out his gun and demands to know who killed his wife. Everyone else subdues him and sticks him in an old chamber for overstimulating patients.

You think actors ever just feel silly?

              It’s soon revealed that Blackburn and Evelyn faked her death in an effort to sow enough panic among the party guests that one of them would shoot Steven. Since they didn’t know about the death of the teach guy and therefore couldn’t predict that Steven would already be on edge enough to pull out a gun, did they just hope really hard that everyone would not only blame him for the death of the wife he publicly hated but also instantly execute him? This plan isn’t a whole lot more developed in the original film, to be fair. Evelyn decides they’re not scaring people enough and instantly stabs Blackburn. She cuts off his head, releases an unconscious Steven from his containment, and plants Backburns’ severed head nearby. Which I must admit is a much better plan to get Steven killed.

              Soon enough Sara shoots Steven and Evelyn gloats over his dead body, but surprise Steven had a bulletproof vest on! Turns out he knew all about their plans as he’d been spying on them and their conversation for months. I went back and checked, Blackburn’s name wasn’t on the invitation list that Steven wrote up. So when Blackburn showed up did he think it was proof that Evelyn was the one who’d invited everyone? Seems like something the script should have maybe addressed? The married couple wrassle a bit and end up barging into the room that a couple of shots earlier in the movie had established as the really spooky place. There’s a black amorphous blob of some sort waiting inside that Pritchard had helpfully referred to as ‘The Darkness’ and it eats Evelyn. Steven stumbles back in shock as the blackness spills out of the room into the rest of the house.

              The last ten minutes of the movie are spent with the remaining cast running away from and being eaten by The Darkness until there’s only Sara and Eddie left. Prichard’s spirit lets them out of an attic window and they crawl out onto an outside ledge. It’s daytime and the safety shutter thuds shut behind them, so I guess that means they’re safe. It’d be weird if the movie had shown us on screen earlier in the movie that the house was able to affect the world far outside itself, much less people who are actively sitting on top of it. They find the envelope containing five checks for $1,000,000 each made out to cash wedged beneath the safety shutter, because why not. As the movie ends as the camera pulls back to reveal they’re perched high above the ocean with no way down.

              The actual ending stinger of the movie is more newsreel footage of Steven and Evelyn being tortured by the old-timey medical ghosts, presumably for all eternity. Which seems a bit unfair in the case of Steven. He certainly wasn’t a nice guy and it’s admittedly implied that he killed some of his previous wives, but Evelyn mercilessly stabbed a man to death and cut off his head, maybe save your eternal torture for the ones who really deserve it, house.

              The movie cost $36 million and brought in $81 million, adjusted, proving the entire conceit behind Dark Castle Entertainment worked. It earned ferociously bad reviews, and I do think it earned them. If ‘The Haunting’ failed by being too big and bombastic to be as stupid as it was, this fails by being too mean and tawdry to be as stupid as it is. It’s not particularly scary or even gory, the guy without a face is probably the only relatively gross visual. The film feels like it’s been edited too close to the bone, like the scenes crowd into each other in an effort to get themselves over with. Edits seem to cut in the middle of actions and there’s very little continuity of either direction or motion. The script leaves tons of plot threads dangling and never pursued, but that could also be the fault of the hatchet job it took to get the length down. I didn’t enjoy it, but it didn’t offend me as a waste of resources like ‘The Haunting’ did. And we get Jeffrey Combs as the evil Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt, it’s hard to be entirely mad at a movie including him.

 

Late Addendum: I also watched the original, so here’s a super quick review: Vincent Price is great, the age gap between his wife and the doctor she was having an affair with made me somewhat uncomfortable, I call complete bullshit on that scene with the spooky length of rope, the puppet skeleton was too wacky no matter how hard they tried to sell it, and even though it’s less than 75 minutes it still had way too much padding and far too little plot. Still better than the remake.