| House on Haunted
Hill is one of the new
breed of waste-no-time thrill machines, like Deep Blue
Sea, and a particularly effective example at that. The
plot is pure contrivance: For a party stunt, a wealthy
amusement-park manufacturer (Geoffrey Rush) offers five
people a million dollars if they spend the night in a former
insane asylum where the patients murdered the sadistic
staff. But it turns out the five people who arrive aren't
the five he invited--did his wife (Famke Janssen), who hates
him, make the switch? From there events unfold with a smart
combination of human and supernatural machinations; spooky
jolts are dispensed at regular, but not entirely
predictable, intervals. The visual effects owe a
considerable debt to Jacob's Ladder, a much more
ambitious movie; House on Haunted Hill just wants to
get under your skin, and succeeds more than you'd expect.
Rush is his entertainingly hammy self; Janssen, Taye Diggs,
Ali Larter and Bridgette Wilson are attractive and
reasonably straight-faced about it all; and Chris Kattan is
genuinely funny as the house's neurotic owner. Some elements
of the plot seem to have been lost in the editing process,
but it hardly matters. More bothersome is that the scares go
flat when computer effects take over at the end--the digital
images just aren't as creepy as the more suggestive stuff
that came before. But that's just the very end; most of the
movie has a lot of momentum |
