House on Haunted Hill Reviews

As far as remakes go, House on Haunted Hill is neither among the best or worst ones. For me, it sits somewhere in the middle. If I were to say which is better out of this and the original, I'd say the original(though that is not perfect either) mainly because of Vincent Price. On its own terms though, this is pretty good. It is flawed though, the characters are never really developed, and while I admired that there was an attempt to expand the story while some of it was effective there were other parts where it felt padded and didn't really go anywhere. Taylor Diggs and Peter Gallagher's performances read too much of both actors playing themselves. But the biggest let down is the ending, which felt fake and so abrupt that you are left with a that's it? sense. On the plus side, it is stylishly filmed, has a good atmosphere and some creepy and fun moments. Geoffrey Rush seems to be having the time of his life and it really shows. Famke Janssen puts her beauty and steel to good use without feeling bland, and while he has next to nothing to say Jeffrey Combs' physical acting really speaks volumes. Overall, not a bad remake but has its flaws. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Oh dear... It was even worse than I thought it would be. I mean, I didn't have some really high expectations concerning this flick but even so it turned out to be a huge disappointment. Indeed, it must be one of the weakest haunted house movies I have seen so far... Basically, you wait during the whole thing for something scary to happen but nothing remotely frightening happens during the whole duration. I thought it was some king of mix between 'Saw' and 'The Haunting', expect it was never unsettling or scary at any moment. Even though the cast was actually decent (Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Ali Larter, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), the performances were quite terrible going from very cheesy to just plain annoying. Even though it seemed to be an interesting idea to remake an old horror flick (I haven't seen the original version), they couldn't have made a more terrible job than this. Compare to this, the remake of 'The Haunting' which was released the same year almost look like a masterpiece. At least, it had some decent special effects which wasn't the case here at all. To conclude, it is a very weak horror feature, I'm actually being really generous with my rating here, and it is not really worth a look whatsoever.

I watched this last year, forgot about it and then watched it on AMC. I enjoy the movie, couple of twists, weird creepy scenes..can't go wrong there. I'm not a big horror/gore fan, so this was pretty good for me. Christ Katan cracks me up in just about everything and Geoffrey Rush is a great actor in general.

Dislikes: Famke was in it and some of the lines were just stupid.

Rating: 6.8/10