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This remake of a 1958 B horror starts off very creepily but
does not managed to keep up the momentum in the effects dominated
last half hour.
Geoffrey Rush plays eccentric millionaire Steven Price. Price
made his millions in the amusement park business where his penchant
for shocking his customers is demonstrated by his latest roller
coaster which features a lift that appears to plummet fatally
and a roller coaster track that seems to break halfway through
the ride. With both these tricks, the customer is given the
fright of their life but remain perfectly safe.
Continuing in this vein, he offers five strangers a prize of
$1 million if they can survive in a night in the creepy house
that was once The Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally
Insane. The premise is that the house is haunted by the ghosts
of former patients, but Price has rigged a few tricks of his
own to make things interesting. As with his theme park rides,
Price knows that nothing bad will really happen to his guests
because he is in control of all the chills, or is he?
Rush is okay in the role that pays homage to the late camp
horror king Vincent Price, while Famke Janssen is delicious
as his scheming wife. Most of the supporting cast are suitably
one dimensional with the only spark coming from Chris Kattan
as the skitzy owner of the house who is scared witless that
everyone is going to die (Question: why does he ever hang around
at the house at all then?).
As expected, the plot is full of holes but that doesn't really
matter in a B-grade horror movie. For most of its length, the
atmosphere is creepy and there are some genuinely shocking moments.
However, towards the end it seems that someone lost the B movie
playbook and it all falls apart. Special effects are a great
invention, but they can rarely be used to make a movie any scarier.
As The Blair Witch Project reminded us, the best low rent horrors
work precisely because they don't have enough cash for flashy
effects so they have to work harder at building atmosphere and
suspense through suggestion. Maybe in future, producers of movies
like this could get better results by cutting back the budgets.
Watch this movie for cheap chills. But it's been done better
elsewhere.
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