Video: How does it look?Ī very, very dark movie. No foolin’ folks, I was on the edge of my seat! With that being said, I dare you to see this flick. Still, the movie is loaded with action, and for the first time in a long, long while…a movie actually scared me. Until the end, they are all convinced that it’s one of Price’s elaborate pranks (and it might be). We start to see things happen, we learn that the house is indeed alive and we’re just wondering who makes it out alive and how. For some reason in movies like this, the stars always seem to split up and go check things out (part of what made “Scream” so funny is that it made fun of just this). The stained glass window shatters for no reason and metal plates have come down over the windows and doors, thereby making escape impossible. Things immediately start to happen, strange things. Rounding out the cast are Famke Jessen as Prices’ wife, Evelyn and SNL star, Chris Kattan who is the owner of the house and wants to get out with his money as fast as he can (he doesn’t, of course). Sara Wolfe (Ali Larter of Varsity Blues) plays an Executive VP, Brigette Wilson plays a “celebrity” who just has to record everything and Peter Gallagher plays Dr. It’s then that we meet the rest of the cast, led by Taye Diggs who plays Eddie, an ex-baseball player. If anyone doesn’t make it, the share is divided among those who do. The rules are simple, spend the night in the house and walk away with a million dollars. For his birthday, he invites a selected group of people to a “Haunted House”. The man is a genius at making peole scared as hell. Anyhow, we find out that he is very dialobical and owns a string of amusement parks that make ordinary roller coasters and such look like child’s play. Maybe it was the accent, I dunno…he just had that look that James Woods has. Now, maybe it’s just me, but it took me a few minutes to convince myself that he was not James Woods. We meet Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush) almost immediately. And while I’m a fan of longer movies, sometimes it’s nice just to get right down to it. Right off the bat I liked this movie, it wasted no time getting to the action and introducing us to the main characters.

Did it need to be remade after such a similar movie by the name of The Haunting came out only months before? Read on and find out… So here we have the “old” Vincent Price thriller, House on Haunted Hill.

Whereas the characters are the same (mostly) and the story is the same, it’s usually just an updated version of an old movie (unless you have Hamlet which was remade twice in the 90’s alone…but that’s an exception). Remakes, are in much of the same sense a “sequal”. I think when people refer to the movie “Psycho” they will be referring to Hitchcock’s masterpiece and not Gus Van Sant’s remake.

Remakes are rarely what their predecessors are.

House on haunted hill blu ray