It later turns out, as in the original, that Mrs. We will expect Price to have booby-trapped his party, and in fact he has a technician hidden somewhere who is ostensibly providing some of the scares. The lesson of the theme-park scenes is that we shouldn't accept anything we see at face value.
HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL DOCTOR MOVIE
House actually begins with a filmed roller-coaster ride: the movie winks at the audience, acknowledging what we've come for. Price is a famous designer of theme-park thrill rides, to which movies of this sort are invariably compared. As Stephen, Geoffrey Rush is made up to look very much like Vincent Price, after whom his character is named (according to the director, Rush based his interpretation of the character on John Waters rather than Price, but apparently when you stick Geoffrey Rush in a John Waters suit, you get Vincent Price). First, we're introduced to the living troublemakers of the flick: Mr. The scene switches to the present, and we're introduced to the main members of the cast. The flashback footage melds into a newsreel account of the massacre, about which I will have more to say at the end of this review. Why is the doctor performing atrocities? Why are the nurses helping him with his vile experiment, and in particular, why is one of them filming it? How did the inmates escape? We don't know, and it doesn't matter: the point of it all is that by the end of the sequence, the loonies have taken control of the camera - a perfect metaphor for the way the rest of the movie unfolds. The action is oddly balletic, and totally without logic. When the camera gives us loving close-ups of a Number 2 pencil being sharpened, we have no doubt that the pencil will soon be jammed into something squishy. The prologue is the "dumb-show" that gives us the key to how the rest of the film will be played. In the perfunctory, wordless prologue, the inmates take control of the institution, and wreak bloody retribution on the Doctor and his accomplices. It's a mental institution, in which demented Doctor Kurt Vonnegut - er, excuse me, Richard Vannicutt - commits horrible crimes in the name of "treatment". The difference is astonishing, and in this aspect the remake gains hugely over the original.Īs the movie opens, it's 1931, and the House isn't a house yet. The new, utterly different House is all verticals, tall and thin and perched atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was long and rectangular and low to the ground, like a bunker.
![house on haunted hill doctor house on haunted hill doctor](https://highdefdiscnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/house_on_haunted_hill_1999_69.png)
Far from being a creaky Gothic mansion, Castle's House looked more like a modern elementary school with delusions of grandeur. The House in William Castle's original was a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and it stood out for two reasons: first, it was phenomenally ugly, especially in the manner in which Castle's camera captured it and second, it seemed the least likely setting for a ghost story that anyone could possibly imagine.
![house on haunted hill doctor house on haunted hill doctor](https://miro.medium.com/max/3528/1*zdAkQqeLpWdEdoSpFy7jhg.png)
The house itself is the first "character" we see. And I still don't think it's finished to my satisfaction. To give you some idea of the conflicted opinions I have of House., it's taken me over six months to complete this review. Anyway, in view of my reactions to House on Haunted Hill - initially mixed but approving, gradually turning sour the more I thought about it - I'm not sure how I feel about the whole enterprise. I suppose they're running out of vintage themes to ruin.
![house on haunted hill doctor house on haunted hill doctor](http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/houseonhauntedhill/images/3/33/RtHoHHvannacutt.jpg)
Remakes of Macabre and 13 Ghosts are on the way. Silver is selling genuine Meat Food Products, but let's face it: they're not the choicest bits of the cow.Īpparently House on Haunted Hill did well enough to convince Silver et al. To abuse a metaphor, Castle over-sold the sizzle because he didn't really have any steak. But Silver and his ilk are fooling themselves.
![house on haunted hill doctor house on haunted hill doctor](https://i2.wp.com/manapop.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/vlcsnap-2020-08-12-19h12m54s706.png)
Silver has packaged some real stinkers in his day, so he may imagine himself to be Castle's successor. Castle was the larger-than-life director and producer whose colorful promotional gimmicks were often better than the movies they supported. The idea of remaking at least one of Castle's films is understandable. Dark Castle's first release is a 1999 remake of 1958's House on Haunted Hill. Joel Silver, along with Robert Zemeckis and director William Malone, has started a new movie company called Dark Castle, dedicated to remaking the films of that notorious showman, William Castle.