ooking like Radio City Music Hall as designed by Albert Speer, the
Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane sits atop a Los
Angeles hillside, a perfectly isolated location for the atrocities that
occur within.
Decades after the inmates took over and torched the place, it has been
restored to its former Art Deco glory as a private home. And Evelyn Price
(Janssen), the vicious wife of billionaire amusements tycoon and practical
joker Steven Price (Rush), wants to have her birthday party there.
When the guests arrive, however, neither Evelyn nor Steven know them:
Eddie (Diggs), a failed baseball player; Jennifer (Larter), a movie executive; former game show hostess Melissa (Bridgette Wilson); suave Dr.
Blackburn (Peter Gallagher); and the house's twitchy caretaker, Pritchett
(Chris Kattan).
Undaunted, Steven offers up this intriguing proposition: Whoever stays
the night will win $1 million cash. The catch? They may not be alive when dawn
breaks.
But what appears at first blush to be an elaborate prank by Steven may
be something else altogether. For starters, the ancient "lockdown"
machinery of the house comes to life, sealing off all routes of escape.
Pritchett has a bad feeling about this: "I'm sure by the end of the night,
we'll be hacked up into little pieces by something--or somebody."
Eddie, Pritchett and Jennifer (or is it Sara?) go into the basement to
find a way to release the mechanism. They discover vestiges of the asylum, including horrible tableaus of dissected corpses, electro-shock rooms, and an operating
theater only Dr. Mengele could love.
Sara/Jennifer loses track of Eddie, then follows an apparition that appears to be
Eddie, and then nearly gets pulled into a vat of blood "the size of a Buick."
Then Melissa goes missing, leaving only a trail of gore...on the ceiling.
Steven, meanwhile, discovers to his dismay that he's not the only one
manipulating the house for horrific effect. Who's that guy in the white
coat with the big knife? Then Evelyn screams....
"This house is pissed."
Riding the new wave of horror that crested with The Blair Witch
Project, House on Haunted Hill is a remake of the 1958
schlock-horror classic from legendary producer William Castle (his
daughter, Terry, is one of the co-producers of the 1999 version). It's the first feature film
from Dark Castle, the production company set up by director Robert Zemeckis
(Back to the Future) and producer Joel Silver (The Matrix),
and it plays like a juiced-up episode of Zemeckis' and Silver's TV show,
Tales from the Crypt, but with better writing and better production values.
It also shows a great wit and imagination, offering up suspense,
frights, gross-outs, creepiness, knowing laughs and a few surprises to
scare life into a genre that's as hoary as haunted houses themselves.
Make no mistake: House is no Shakespeare in Love. But its
creators have a strong command of the genre and faithfully give the
audience what it wants, while undercutting its expectations at the same
time.
The eponymous house is everything the audience expects: rotting wood,
dripping water, dangling chains, and flickering lights. The hapless guests are
the usual collection of innocents and back-stabbers. And the horrors await.
Viewers can be sure that if they see an electro-shock table, or a
psychosis-inducing chamber, or a rusty saw, it will come into play at some
point in the film.
But the filmmakers have gone above and beyond the call of duty in the
way they envision the expected horrors, and they find new ways to use CGI
effects to create nightmares the audience hasn't seen before. Only the
ending, with its predictable Grand-Guignol finish, disappoints.
The cast, headed by Oscar-winner Rush (Shine) in the Vincent
Price role, ably handles its tasks (mostly running, screaming and
yelling). Kattan (Saturday Night Live) stands out, combining a
killer deadpan with hysterical flailing about. His fatalistic character
interjects gloomy statements--"We're all going to die"--so often that the
others start to ignore him, even when the mutilations begin in earnest.
He's very funny.
he small town of Gallup, Texas, and its sheriff, Emmett Kimsey
(Phillips), have a problem. A young couple has been brutally killed. The Centers for Disease Control and a scientist named Dr.
Alexander McCabe (Bob Gunton) believe they know the cause of the attack, so
they call in wildlife zoologist Dr. Sheila Casper (Meyer) for
confirmation.
Casper takes one look at the victims and realizes what she's seeing is
impossible. Bats simply don't kill people. They are usually harmless and
gentle creatures. It doesn't take long for Dr. McCabe to admit that two
bats he was experimenting with have escaped. However, they're no ordinary
bats. These have been genetically altered to be intelligent, bigger and
more aggressive. Worse yet, they carry a virus that can turn a normal bat into a vicious killer.
Sheila and her assistant, Jimmy (Leon), team up with Emmett to figure
out where the bats are sleeping during the day. Soon they realize they
aren't just facing a couple of bats. They're facing an entire colony of
infected killers. And if they don't find the bats in time, the ravenous
creatures will migrate to other parts of the country, infecting normal bats
along the way. In a matter of months, the killer bats could infest the
entire continental United States. If that were to happen, the fragile
balance of nature might be destroyed and humans might become nothing more
than prey. Now it's
up to Emmett and Sheila to save the day...and the town...and
perhaps America itself. However, the intelligent bats have their own plans.
No surprises, but some batty excitement
Bats doesn't
waste time on silly stuff like characterization or depth. The
formulaic story is too busy with non-stop action to bother with that
nonsense.
Yet while there's nothing new or original about Bats, there is a
certain creepy excitement in the way the bat attacks are filmed.
The filmmakers have wisely done away with logic and style, instead going straight
for the jugular with pumping action throughout the entire flick. There's no time
to worry about why the characters do anything, since they are constantly
reacting to new situations.
The actors gamely take on their stereotyped roles, but basically they
are just tools to advance the action. Phillips (Courage Under Fire)
is a fine actor who has unfortunately appeared in far too many B-films that offer him
poorly written stock characters to play. This is just another one for his
resume.
The special effects are mediocre at best, and the close-up scenes of the
really ugly bats crawling toward or on their victims are actually funny.
The bat faces drool and try to appear threatening, but never look like
anything other than demented Beanie Babies.
That actually works in the film's favor, since the screenplay doesn't have any
humor. In fact, the script is just a bunch of action scenes spliced
together, so the silly special effects give the film some much-needed
character. Too bad the makers of this picture didn't find
some other antagonists besides nutty scientists and evil government
conspiracies. Those villains have long surpassed boring.
