THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE
Déjà vu!

  Let's have a look at this: four people go to spend some time in a haunted house.  One's a paternal scientist-type.  One's a brash, younger man.  One is an oversexed woman, and the last, a woman entirely too attuned to the supernatural goings-on here.  Does this sound familiar to anybody else?

Based on the novel Hell House by Richard Matheson (never read it, though I have noticed it repackaged and available in trade paperback lately), that's yer plot in a nutshell, and it sounds an awful lot like The Haunting.  I STILL haven't read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, so I don't know how much this movie (or the book it's based on) owes to it, but they both follow Robert Wise's 1960 film, and the movie definitely suffers for the comparisons it invites and cannot hope to live up to.

A wealthy, aging man has called upon the four (well, three - one of the women is the scientist's wife who can't bear to be left at home alone) to bring to him, for a considerable payment, evidence of life after death.  And where better to go than the local haunted house, referred to by everybody as Hell House, so you can tell it's not one of those NICE haunted houses.  Things go bump in the night, and soon enough, everybody's up to their knees in ectoplasm.

The story's good (except for a silly "reverse the polarity!" machine which we're supposed to believe might actually resolve things), and the film is atmospheric enough; there just isn't really any suspense or fright.  There are any number of scenes which came close (like the ectoplasm scene), but nothing really grabs ya by the throat.

There was plenty that I appreciated here; the performances are all good, art direction too.  The characters, for once, never have to convince each other of the credibility of psychic phenomena, and they all take it as a given.  And the pace quickens considerably in the last twenty minutes or so, giving us a few surprises.

But throughout, I couldn't help but feel I'd seen it all before and seen it done better.  The unintentional hilarity provided by an attack from a vicious housecat doesn't help, and while it's not the movie's fault, giving away the fate of a central character right on the front of the box is usually a bad idea.

I'm not a big fan of the haunted-house corner of the genre, but I've nothing against it either, and when one works, it works.  The Legend Of Hell House didn't.  Still, I'm curious about the book; The Omega Man would never have sent me rushing out to read I Am Legend.

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