Reel Deal: Haunting Hill a scary waste of time

By Tara Dempsey and Ryan Leach

Offer someone $1 million and they will do just about anything. We witnessed it this weekend as we watched five strangers try to make it through the night in The House on Haunted Hill.

With ominous invitations to a party at an abandoned mental institution, the guests meet each other, their hosts, and in some cases, their demise. The hosts, Vincent Price (Geoffrey Rush) and his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen), are out to have a little fun, but things soon get out of control.

The Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, the backdrop for this movie, starts to take an active and deadly role in the Price's games as it (yes, the house) starts knocking off the guests one by one.

RYAN'S REVIEW

At first I thought this movie was going to be like The Haunting, but I tossed out that thought within 20 minutes. The movie builds tension along with the scariness it evokes. It is not just another "what's around the next corner" horror flick.

The best thing about this film was the sequence when Geoffrey Rush is captured by the house and taken into an old operating room. In these scenes the film gives homage to Jacob's Ladder, with fast moving heads, and Fire in the Sky as Rush is enclosed in a skin-tight sheet of latex and plastic. It is visually and mentally stimulating. I must say this film is a lot more gory and morbid than I expected; not to say that this is bad at all, just beware.

Like last week's flick, the concluding scenes were not the high-point of the movie. This time the downfall comes once the full evil of the house is unleashed. It looks cheesy and just doesn't flow with the movie. It seems like the director only had a day left to shoot and said, "Well I guess we better end it so here we go." It is a shame because if the movie had even a half way decent ending it would have been very good. B Ð

TARA'S TAKE

I am not even going to try to search for good things to say about this movie because it simply sucked. Not a very articulate assessment, I know, but there is no sense in me wasting my time looking at aspects like character development (there was none), cinematography or anything along those lines.

The special effects were so generic it was insulting. From the flickering lights to the massive amounts of spider webs to the actual concept of a haunted mental institution, it was as if someone checked out a book on how to make a haunted house and turned it into a feature-length movie. The whole movie looked like a Marilyn Manson video. Then there is Rush's imitation of Vincent Price (the guy who does the spooky voice on "Thriller") Ñ the thin mustache was forgivable but did the writers have to give his character the same last name as the late master of horror? It's called subtlety, guys Ñ you should look it up.

The thing that is most concerning is the career choice of the actors in this movie, specifically Geoffrey Rush. Rush won an Oscar for his role in Shine in 1995. He was nominated for his supporting role in Shakespeare in Love earlier this year, and now he's doing this? Talk about a schizophrenic agent.

Chris Kattan of "Saturday Night Live" plays Watson Pritchett, the jittery descendent of the building's original owner, and is the only good thing about this movie. As funny as he was though, his role does not justify seeing it. For those of you who have already seen this, I'm sorry. If you haven't seen it, don't bother. D Ð