There's no point in complaining that the blood pools, dismemberment and rampaging spooks cheapen the purity of a property that was always supposed to be disreputable, and Malone may even be essaying a further homage by yoking in some of the apparitions from Castle's Thirteen Ghosts (1963). However, the try-anything approach of writer-director William Malone (another Crypt alumnus) is actually very much in the spirit of Castle (whose daughter Terry joins the production team), and so this noisy, scrappy, effects-heavy rethink manages to respect the original's intentions far more than such recent remakes as the 1999 versions of The Mummy and The Haunting. The film shifts rapidly from the explicable but far-fetched business to the plot-thread about the house's wispy blob of damned souls seeking further victims, so both strands suffer. It's a bit like having two skeletons in one body. Though it contains the bones of the old Robb White script, this new Haunted Hill adds a genuinely supernatural plot wound around the old business of the duplicitous wife contriving to knock off her husband but being one-upped by his even more ingenious counterplots. But he also combined solid old-fashioned horror premises with cynical characterisation and casually lunatic plot devices to provoke constantly a reaction of befuddled astonishment. He amused himself with a rollercoaster pacing (wittily literalised in this remake, whose protagonist is a rollercoaster tycoon) piling shock on shock. Remembered for gimmicks like Emergo (a skeleton puppet dangled over the audience) and Percepto (small seat-buzzers to tingle spines), Castle really came into his own as a horrormeister with House on Haunted Hill (1958). They turn their attention here to one of the first film-makers to be influenced by the 50s horror comics which inspired the Crypt series: producer (and sometime director) William Castle. Producers Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler are veterans of the cable series Tales from the Crypt and the films ( Demon Knight, Bordello of Blood) spun off from it. They are saved by Pritchett's ghost, who has resisted joining the Darkness and opens a shutter so they can escape. However, the Darkness, a supernatural force, has brought together descendants of the five 1931 escapees to die and fulfil the curse. Evelyn is conspiring with Blackburn, her lover, to have Price murdered by framing him for her own apparent death and so terrorising the guests that one of them (Sara) will shoot him. Shutters trap the guests and Schecter, Price's special-effects man, is killed before he can do any of the planned stunts. Price offers 1 million to anyone who survives a night in the house, which Pritchett explains is alive and malicious. On the night of the party, Price welcomes the guests: office-worker Sara (who stole her boss' invite), baseball player Eddie, aspirant celebrity Melissa and physician Blackburn. A mysterious force hacks into Stephen's computer and changes his guest list. Evelyn, wife of amusement-park tycoon Stephen Price, convinces her husband to rent the institute, now the property of Watson Pritchett, for her birthday party. He traps them inside and allows them to burn to death. At the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, an art deco fortress atop a Californian cliff, abused patients rebel against the sadistic and murderous Dr Vannacutt. Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.ฤก931.
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