House on Haunted Hill (1999)

This is a great film which offers some genuinely shocking and jumpy moments. Judging from the rating and the hate in the other reviews I've read I found this actually quite a fair and respectful remake which attempted successfully to take it in a new direction. Geoffrey Rush gives a deliciously camp performance which is totally OTT but entirely suitable for the subject and the fact that he is playing a role previously played by the horror king Vincent Price. A great horror, with twists and turns, with a directing style that is quite 1960's Batman in a way but works well, producing an effect with proves unsettling, a great additional feature for a horror.

'House on Haunted Hill' is a cheap, trashy horror film with some dreadful acting, a weak plot and a pathetic ending, but it somehow still manages to be entertaining and creepy as hell.The film does a good job at building up tension and suspense, especially towards the end, which makes the disappointing ending even more of an anticlimax. Forget the plot though, the best part of this film is the incredibly creepy individual scenes. In particular, the scene involving Mr. Price in the chamber seeing all sorts of disturbing and creepy things freaked me out. The ghost scene where Melissa disappears is also very creepy, and there are plenty of others.Overall, I was pleasantly surprised - 'House on Haunted Hill' was better than I expected. It's a very cheap, low quality movie, but it does serve a purpose if you're looking for something creepy that will freak you out.

Gathered together for a birthday party, the guests and hosts of a lavish celebration in a haunted asylum find the events part of the house' intent to kill them off and must find a way to get out alive.This one was quite an enjoyable and vastly improved remake. This gets a lot right with the atmosphere and setting on display, which is pretty chilling throughout the film here as this comes from how well this one utilizes the house it its advantage. The long, endless darkened hallways, cramped treatment rooms and overall atmosphere of the disuse throughout with cobwebs and disrepair found here make for some really creepy elements along the way which set up the ghost action nicely. This one gets the better of creepy events happening in a creepy location, as early scenes of them following the ghostly doppelganger all throughout the different rooms, a fantastic encounter in the operating room where they're only visible on a video camera and the later scene of the group encountering the hidden experiment rooms where the ghosts' manage to trap them in their patient treatments which result in some bloody kills and tense scenes. Likewise, the finale also manages to interject quite a bit of fun here by showcasing the thrilling chases around the basement, the formation of the mass of spectral blob that holds the ghosts of the dead as well as the fun of the big chase around the house as the relentless race to get up the house before it swallows the remaining survivors is a fun, incredibly action-packed finale here. Along with the great gore and creepy back-story, these here are enough for this one to hold off the few flaws here. The biggest issue here is the fact that this one really overdoes the bickering couple angle to the point of overkill, not only making it questionable about why they're together but the fact that they continue to feel that way deep into the film it grows tiresome, as well as prevents this from really buying into what's going on. It would've been a lot more credible had they stopped going at each other and bought into the truth. Finally, this one really strains credibility with how it gets the group to the house which makes no sense at all about how a supernatural entity would be able to conduct business in that manner when it's overt display of powers in doing that mean it could've just killed them off without ever needing them o come into the house in the first place. However, these are mostly minor points that don't hold this one down all that much.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Brief Nudity.

Some of this reviewers need to take a chill pill. There is a huge difference between a remake (which statistically Hollywood tends to mess up more often than it succeeds) and a re-imagining, where the Rulebook is thrown out the window and, basically, its No Holds Barred. This is a re-imagining and as such it is really a lot of fun. It is one thing to make the jump from B&W to colour. It is an entirely different order of magnitude to pump up your re-do with hi tech special effects, magic glasses that enable the characters to see what should not be seen, and at the finale, some sort of giant clockwork that you would otherwise expect to find in Dr. Who. This film was released at Halloween, which means in effect that the studio was looking for a fast buck and not trying to produce THE MATRIX. I think they exceeded their own expectations. A great cast, recognizable names, and the wandering through the basement is very creepy and good scary fun.