ThiefHott Too much of everything

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

destinylives52 Manny's Movie Musings: a rich amusement park entrepreneur (played by Geoffrey Rush) and his wife invite people to join them for a night of "fun" inside the "House On Haunted Hill," which has a bloody and sinister past. Any guest who stays the whole night will be given a check for $1 million dollars. Before the guests can agree to the terms, steel shutters unexpectedly lock everybody in. Rush's games and ulterior motives will initiate events that he hopes will benefit him; but the evil within the building has other ideas. My most memorable, movie moment of "House On Haunted Hill" is the scene that shows the escaped, criminally insane patients killing the asylum staff. This movie is a mildly entertaining — if you are high on booze — and mostly silly piece of Hollywood crap that concentrates on style instead of substance. Oh, and the shenanigans are too many to count, but here is one: the evil is locked up by a brick wall, but it can go through floors and ceilings once it escapes. Yup, cocaine and pain killers flows freely in the entertainment business. It explains a lot of crappy movies, doesn't it?Mannysmemorablemoviemoments

classicsoncall I imagine we're all products of our upbringing and environment. When I was about ten years old, the original "House on Haunted Hill" scared the bejeezus out of me and set the bar for horror films I'd see in the future. If you watch that movie today, a lot of it comes across as campy or cheesy, but there are still those subtle touches that manage to evoke a response, like the first time a female character turns around and experiences the frightful face of the home's caretaker looking like some evil monster.The reaction I got from this picture was - why did they even bother? It seems like a colossal waste of time, in fact, this is the second time I tried watching it, the first time I dropped out when it just seemed pointless to me. There doesn't seem to be any real rationale as to what should be the logic of the story. Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan) insists it's the house itself that's evil, whereas we see some guy Schecter running the operation from some crummy basement. Owner Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush) seems to be in on some of the house's mechanical gadgets but not others. It's no secret that Price and his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen) hate each other, but no sooner than it's revealed she's in cahoots with Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), she offs him unceremoniously. I just didn't get any of it.At least the picture paid some homage to the original movie. The principal character was named Price in deference to Vincent Price, the star of the 1959 film, and oddly enough, Rush had an eerie resemblance to the iconic actor. This story upped the ante on how much the surviving guests would receive if they made it in the house the entire night. Inflation must have taken the earlier ten thousand dollar award and raised it to a million. The coffin party favors with a gun inside was another connection, but after all that, it was pretty much a disaster to my thinking. If the idea was for the special effects to overwhelm the poor story line, I think that failed too. For all their simplicity, the effects in the original picture left a lot more to the imagination. With this one, I went right to sleep and not a single nightmare.

GL84 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.

A_Different_Drummer 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.