House On Haunted Hill
They always say never meet your idols because you are always going to be disappointed.
Similarly, I’d say; if you have a film that you loved when you were a child and haven’t watched it since you were a child, don’t watch it. Because how it really is, is never exactly how you had built it up in your head. Illusions are damaged and it feels all wrong.
This is exactly what happened to me. When I was a young girl, ten I believe, me and my sister (that corrupting person she was) had popped on scary movie House On Haunted Hill, the remake. I remember being terrified. Cacking myself regularly on first viewing, I had to switch it off and give myself a break before watching it to the bitter end. It had always stuck in my mind, this ultimate scary movie gold that had chilled me to the core and had given me nightmares…
Up until I took it upon myself to watch it again. I wanted to watch a good and frightening movie as the cold sets in and the Halloween is coming. I was sorely disappointed that I had sat all the way through it this time, sleeping a dreamless sleep after.
House On Haunted Hill is a 1999 remake of Vincent Prices 1959 movie of the same name. Theme Park mogul Steven Price (coincidence? No,) hosts a birthday party for his spoiled bitch of a wife. Set in an abandoned insane asylum where hundreds of patients and doctors perished in a fire. Having a flair for the shock and surprising, Steven seemingly invites some unknown guests and gives them a challenge; if they can survive the night, the $1 Million. The thing is, despite the cheap scares Price has set up, there is something more sinister going on with the house and all around are going to stay…..forever.
Why Is The Bad?
It is perhaps one of the worst horror movies ever. And part of me died admitting that. The plot is heavily convoluted; bordering between “what the fuck” and predictability and never quite going into the unknown and shocking. One minute, it’s the ghosts and then it’s the wife, then it’s both. And the character have no redeeming quality about them, you never get any time to connect with them. They run around the house half blindly, dropping in plot preposition here and there, never really doing much but screaming badly. The acting, which includes Geoffrey Rush, is subpar. The storyline is ridiculous. The computer generated effects laughable. The scares a collection of Hammer horror Z-Movie type things, like a bad metal music video created by a teenage boy.
Why Is It Good?
Because there is the air of that movie that kept me up and nostalgia still brings me back to it. Plus, it is insanely trashy which appeals to me on a numerous amount of levels. My spiritual default is trash. The thing about House On Haunted Hill is that if you push past all of its mistakes, it is actually quite fun. It’s like bad haunted train at a pop up fair. You jump, you don’t know why, but you jump and then laugh afterwards, enjoying the Nu- Metal soundtrack afterwards. It is still highly enjoyable with enough red stuff and ghoulish antics to keep you going (with that terror Jeffry Combs appearing too.)
House On Haunted Hill now will never be the movie then. And I am ok with that. It didn’t live up to the expectations my teen self had, but it become a little guilty treasure that I can go to whenever I want to switch off.
TTFN
Cookie.