Hello and welcome back everyone, while
yesterday’s film came from the dark depths of Michael Bay’s horror remake machine Platinum Dunes, today’s offering sprang forth from another production company, Dark Castle Productions, and a couple of other big time Hollywood names, Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. Formed in 1999 with the expressed idea of remaking William Castle’s classic shockers, Dark Castle’s first offering was today’s entry on the countdown,
House on Haunted Hill. First off, I want to say that the 1959 film starring Vincent Price and directed by William Castle will always stand as one of the classics of horror cinema. So the fact that this remake could overcome that kind of mark against it and end up on this list is a testament to the production. If that doesn’t convince you how I feel about this flick, then let me say this, Chris Kattan is in it and I still like it, and better still, I think he's good in it.
Anyone who is familiar with the 1959 film will be happy to see that the same basic structure of the film is firmly in place. A group of revelers is invited to spend the night in a haunted house, in this case an asylum where hundreds of people were killed. In 40 years, prices had gone up considerably for such a feat. In '59 $10,000 might do, forty years later these folks are in it to the tune of a cool million if they make it through the night. The host is once again an eccentric millionaire, this time Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush) who made his money off terrifyingly twisted amusement park rides, and the party is for his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen) who he appears to despise. He had chosen a group of guests who would all be desperate for the money, but the people who arrived, while they might share that same trait, are not the people Price claims to have invited.Once the asylum’s ancient security system gets tripped trapping them all all inside until the morning, the bodies start piling up. As some of the guest fall prey to a darkness in the house connected to diabolical experiments, but some of the dead faced a more earthbound foe.
Just in case you don’t want light spoilers of an eleven year old film, I’m going to go ahead and warn you to skip down to the next paragraph. To properly discuss what I like about the film, I have to talk about the last half. As deaths start flying, and the reveals start to happen,
House on Haunted Hill continues to swing back and forth between the horrors of Man and the evils of the supernatural world. It’s almost as if the living and the dead are competing to see who can be the bigger bastard. I love that the filmmakers chose to bring in that dynamic which was so much a part of the original film. At first glance, before I watche
d House on Haunted Hill, I didn’t have much hope for it. It looked like a straight up supernatural film that landed Geoffrey Rush because he had always desperately wanted to wear a pencil thin moustache. While I can’t say for certain that the latter isn’t true,
House on Haunted Hill wisely didn’t put all their eggs in one basket. Mixing portions of a ghost movie with a crime thriller and a gore film, they came up with what I consider a successful mix that combines the three genres while paying homage to Castle’s original film.
Welcome back all you folks who were scared off by the spoilers in the last paragraph. In case you wondered, the rest of us were not just talking about you. I was talking about director William Malone. They don’t make them much more interesting than this guy. He got his start in the horror biz at age 19 working at the legendary Don Post studios where he would design
The infamous William Shatner mask that we all know as Michael Myers. He made his first feature film,
Scared to Death, in 1981, but many Klaus Kinski fans might recognize his name from the film
Creature. He then moved into serialized TV getting jobs directing
Freddy’s Nightmares and
Tales from the Crypt. It was probably the second of those two jobs that brought him to the attention of
Tales executive producer Robert Zemeckis who asked Malone to direct
House on Haunted Hill. Malone and cinematographer Rick Bota (
Barb Wire, The Glimmer Man, Tales from the Crypt (TV)) did a good job tempering down the music video style editing, sweeping cross section camera zooms, and jerky camera moves that were so popular around that time. There is still some of that going on, but Bota and Malone create an genuine atmosphere, an element so often forgotten or overlooked in modern horror.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk some about the cast of this film because so many of the stars went on to much bigger things. Ali Larter, later a star of NBC’s
Heroes, and Taye Diggs, famous for reasons I’m not sure of, star as two of the “contestants” brought to the house. Diggs is as serviceable as anything I have seen him in, but Ms. Larter got much, much better between this film and developing superpowers. Also making appearances are Fanke Janssen, who would go on to play Jean Grey in
X-Men, Peter Gallagher, a veteran actor who somehow ended up on both
The O.C. and
Californication, James Marsters of
Buffy fame, and Lisa Loeb, who, as I have been told, misses you. That still leaves me with three actors I have to talk about a little more in depth.
First off, he has a barely there role, but if you squint during scenes of the evil spectral doctor, it is none other the genre film stalwart Jeffery Combs. Any film is better for having him in it. (Even
Castle Freak) Next up is Chris Kattan. I mentioned him earlier, and I often just hate everything about him. However, his nervous, high strung, sadly comic character here was fully realized, and for a moment, and only a moment, I forgot all about Mr. Peepers. The last actor is the most important. Like Vincent Price in the original House on Haunted Hill, Geoffrey Rush’s character may not be the main focus of events, but they all revolve around him. It was also very refreshing to see that he had obviously gotten the memo, play it big, camp it up, have a little fun before we start dragging people into vats of blood and cutting their heads off. Rush is having a blast, and I think that carries this film far past many of its foibles.
What Dark Castle wisely attempted to do was not try an obliterate the memory of William Castle’s film, but instead they amped up the double crosses, the vicious murders, and the freaky ghosts bringing the skeleton of the film along with them. Since the skeleton was such a major portion of Castle’s film, it only seems appropriate. Well that about wraps it up for today, but I still have eleven more goodies coming for you soon. So keep them comments coming and keep checking back as I keep counting down. Oh, and you folks keep reading so you can find out who my special guest if for today!
Bugg Rating
Today’s guest,
Chance Shirley, made one of my favorite films of all time,
Hide and Creep, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s better than anything that’s going to be on this list for a while so you should check it out! Chance is a great dude, and this is his third year in a row participating in the
Halloween Top 13. I’ve only got one other three time contributor this year (either people are slack or scared to think of remakes), and it makes me very happy to introduce my first one. Take it away Chance….
“Hey, man. Just wanted to drop my two cents on you regarding your Halloween remake series on your website. Is there a greater horror movie, remake or otherwise, than John Carpenter's
THE THING? I don't think so. I also think Zack Snyder's
DAWN OF THE DEAD is pretty watchable. Not nearly as good as the original, though.”
Those are both great picks Chance. I wonder if either of them will appear on the countdown. I don’t wonder very hard, but I do wonder. Ok, I bet they both do, but I shan’t tell you in what place. For that kind of information, you’re going to have to stay tuned to the countdown, and stay tuned to The Lair for any news on Chance. I know his second film,
Interplanetary, is gearing up for a DVD release in 2011. Iin the meantime, you Netflix Instant Watchers check out
Hide and Creep and come on back here tomorrow for more remake goodness.
(And if you don’t have your list in to the Halloween Top 13, I’m still looking for two more victims, ummm, participants, to take part.
Click here for details.)
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In Popcorn, Jill stars as Maggie, a film student who has been having reoccurring nightmares of a strange man, but she tries to put it out of her mind as she helps her film class get ready for a horror film marathon. After landing the Dreamland Theater, a nearly condemned cinema that once caught fire, as their venue, they assemble a number a movies to show that involve props in the style of William Castle’s theatrical stunts. Getting ready for the show, they come across the film Possessor, a film made by Laynard Gates the leader of a film cult and a man that Maggie begins to believe is her father. When the big night comes and the films start rolling, the bodies start stacking up, but Jill’s suspicion that her auteur patriarch is to blame turns out to be untrue as the killer is someone much closer than she could ever expect.
The Zorba family is down on their luck. Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) can’t even make ends meet to keep his family’s furniture. So when he gets a mysterious telegram and finds out that he’s inherited a fully outfitted mansion from a forgotten uncle, it’s the break that they’ve been needing. Unfortunately, along with being fully furnished, the house also comes fully stocked with a selection of 12 captured spirits. The Zorba family must survive the apparitions of a killer cook, headless lion tamer, and flaming skeletons without becoming the 13th ghost. If they make it, they might be lucky enough to find a hidden treasure, all of the departed Uncle’s cash, hidden somewhere in the house.
Usually I wait until a little later on to talk about the gimmick, but Illusion-O was so much of a part of this film. As the patrons entered the theater, they were given the Illusion-O viewer which you can see pictured on the left. At the beginning of the film, Mr. Castle explains that if you look through the blue part, for the faint of heart, the ghosts will disappear, and if you choose the red part, for the brave, they will all but leap out of the screen. The film is littered with moments where the film turns a light blue color, the words ‘Use Viewer” come on the screen, and an array of “ghosts” can be seen. While I understand the viewer did indeed work, the spirits can be seen by the naked eye. I would love to see the film with the viewer, but I didn’t even have a pair of 3-D glasses around to check it out with.
As much as the gimmick intrigued me, it does feel a bit intrusive to the film in a general sense. The narrative is frequently interrupted for a lengthy ghost sequence that even with the viewer doesn't appear to be action packed. Now that’s not to say I did not enjoy several of them. The ghost lion with the headless ghost lion tamer was very amusing, and who among us does not like a flaming skeleton? This time Castle came up with a promotion that actually did work, but not so much with the film itself. Don‘t get me wrong. As a theater experience, I can‘t see how it wouldn‘t be a blast, but most of us will never get to see this film beyond our home. Looking at 13 Ghosts as a film, it doesn’t hold up as well as House on Haunted Hill or The Tingler.
One of the other reasons for this is the Zorba family. Donald Woods was fifth billed as the father Cyrus Zorba, but the long time character actor was the high point in the film’s cast. Grabbing top billing was child star Charles Herbert as the idiotic child Buck Zorba. Herbert, and Buck, about drove me crazy because this kid was a flat out moron. There’s just no two ways around it. Just watch the scene he shares with Route 66 star Martin Milner as Ben Rush, the devious lawyer. This kid can be talked into anything by any adult. I guess I should be thankful that the lawyer just wanted to steal money from the family because there’s no telling what Buck might have agreed to.
Then you’ve got Zorba’s daughter, Madea. Now there’s nothing wrong with Jo Morrow or her acting, and I even found her quite fetching. The problem is her name, Madea. William Castle and screenwriter Robb White could not have foreseen Tyler Perry, and so they could not have anticipated the audience thinking about “family reunions” or how she can “do bad all by herself”. I, on the other hand, quite maturely could not resist cracking a few such jokes. On the other end of the references spectrum was Margaret Hamilton. Playing the creepy housekeeper who gets thrown in with the creepy house, the actress, better known as The Wicked Witch of the West, winks at her own image in a time long before The Wizard of Oz gained cult status. 
The parts of the film that were uninhibited by the blue filter looked quite good thanks to cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc. He would go on to shoot such diverse films such as Confessions of an Opium Eater, Blazing Saddles, and Flight of the Phoenix. 13 Ghosts got a score from frequent Castle collaborator Von Dexter who both has a badass name and really carries the film though the disjointed gimmick driven moments. As a package, 13 Ghosts is an entertaining film, but it does lose a little something for the home viewer. It also doesn’t have the narrative strength of some of Castle's other films.
Now before I close out, I have to talk about the 2001 remake, Thirteen Ghosts. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who will disagree with me, but this is one case where I enjoy the remake more than the original. It dispatched with the Illusion-O gimmick, though kept the viewers intact though a plot point, and amped up the ghosts into a group of genuinely creepy creatures. While the remake doesn’t have the Castle’s flair, it does provide a solid argument in favor of the remake. One of the things any remake needs to do is remind you of the original. Each time I take in Tony Shalhoub and Rah Digga battling The Angry Princess and The Jackal, it makes we want to take a second look at Castle’s classic so I can bask in the comforting blue glow of Illusion-O. 
