Been there. Done that. Got the blood stained t-shirt. Died.
It's been done before, with The Haunting being the last
notable haunted house offering.
The House on Haunted Hill started off much more promising than The
Haunting, ripping in with some pretty gory flash-back footage then
bringing us up to date with a tremendous reworking of The Eurythmic's,
Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, and a superb introduction to the world of
Christopher Price, Theme Park designer extraordinaire.
Price's wife, having seen a television documentary about the House on Haunted
Hill, formerly an asylum for the criminally insane where all manner of demonic
surgery was carried out by its demented stewards, decides that it would be the
ideal place to hold her forthcoming birthday party.
Price conjures up a novel little scheme, shreds her guest list and invites his
own guests, offering them a million dollars each if they survive the night, and
sets about creating some shenanigans to make the night go with a bang.
The first sign that something has gone screwy is when the wrong guests turn up
at the house; someone's tampered with the guest list on Price's computer, and
then strange things start to happen which Price maintains he's not instigated.
Trapped, the guests decide to explore the house to find a way to escape. A great
opportunity to go down to the cellar with a flashlight and experience the
atmospherically macabre history of the house in the rooms below.
We soon find out that Price and his wife aren't going to take an award for
the couple exhibiting most togetherness, his wife suspects that the whole
setup is a scam to get her killed but we soon become immersed in the strange
going ons as Price denies that things happening are under his command.
Everything flows wonderfully at first. The first guest disappears, apparently
scrapped all over the walls of the house. Then Price's wife dies strapped to
an electro-convulsive therapy table. And then we get Price locked up in a
frightening submersion chamber.
And that's when all the fun and enjoyment went out of the film for me, as we
were assaulted by a battery of blinding flashes of light in the name of
dramatic effect.
I'd already suffered the discomfort caused by bright flashes of torches shone
around in the dark but this was too much. Being prone to migraine attacks
triggered by bright flashes of light, and being perhaps even more sensitive than
usual in the aftermath of a very heavy cold, this was painful. Watching was
just too much to endure.
And, soon after, the plot started to get a little bit more twisted and
confusing.
Was Price trying to kill his wife ? Was his wife trying to kill him ? Was
there an agenda I'd missed ? Was the house really haunted ?
When the c--p, computer generated, nasty thing showed up, it was the
last straw. I must have mentally thrown in the towel as everything suddenly
seemed dull and pointless, and confusing.
And with just about the same enthusiasm, the film came to an almost sudden
end. Terminated with such speed, that it was hard to tell what the twist was at
all.
All the initial, excellent, work thrown down the drain because of poor visual
effects and rubbish CGI.
This blinding flashes of light trick in cinematography is not new but
it seems to be becoming all pervasive; the trailer for The Sixth Sense
was a particularly nasty piece of work in this respect.
Maybe the majority of cinema audiences don't suffer adverse effects but a large
minority do, even those without a history of migraine of similar problems. It is
an effect which many don't find pleasant and it is unfortunate that so many film
makers have jumped on the, "This will blow their minds", bandwagon. Yes, it
does, but we don't enjoy it, and we won't appreciate you for it.
Although this episode of the film had a highly negative effect on my viewing
pleasure of the rest of the film, I think there was more to it than that; the
film really did seem to lose its cohesion towards the end and highlighted a
number of other failings of the film.
The limited number of locations used throughout the film started to become
boring. The shock value of the emerging gore was dulled by a feeling of, "Yeah,
yeah; now move the film along".
And someone has got to tell directors that swirly, inky, ethereal computer
generated monsters just aren't scary.
And it was never really clear to me, at the end of the film, who had ripped the
face of Price's special effects engineer off.
From such a promising start, the House on Haunted Hill let itself down,
and let itself down badly.
