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It’s Halloween, everyone is buzzing with the Halloween aura, and you’re in the mood for a great scare. You venture off to multiple haunted houses, to only be disappointed with the miniscule frights, and poor performances from the men in Jason masks chasing you. Your only plead is for an actual scare, so does Warner Brothers quench our thirst? Not exactly.

On that note, maybe the sleek Hollywood of the nineties is incapable of producing a real fright. Now when you hear the word "real," you should automatically exclude the Scream spin-offs. Do you ever wonder why when Halloween rolls around, you’re not reaching for the modernized horror section, but crouching down in the back of the video store rummaging through the classics?

After the cheesy beginning, the first scene shows the Vannacut Psychiatric Institute as it was in the early fifties. The institute was host to some of the most horrific medical experiments known to man. And at the helm of this institute is the Dr. himself, Dr. Vannacut, a lunatic sadist.

Billionaire Steven Price is to invite a group of people to stay the night at House on Haunted Hill, upon his wife Evelyn’s request. He shreds the list and congers up his own. Just one problem: the list magically changes itself. When the guests arrive, Price continues on with his sick and twisted plan: scare the invitees to death, not literaly, or so he thinks. He makes an offer to the guests, that if they stay the night in the house, they will each receive a check for $1 million. There’s just one catch, a minor one at that; they have to be alive to receive it. But just as Price announces this, the shutdown system in the house turns on, containing our dear friends within the confinements of the house.

The movie just takes a complete turn for the worse here, as they decide to take a little trip to the basement (which happens to be a labyrinth of concrete) and try to override the system. The movie dishes out several, common, cliche scenes without, including several solo journeys into the dark regions of the haunted asylum and opening doors that should be kept shut.


Hollywood really needs to spend some more time to try and figure out how to lure in helpless victims into an obviously creepy, haunted, dark room. There has to be a better way than just plain and simple curiosity, we’re just not buying it anymore. Let me lay out the scene for you: Diggs and one of the female characters are roming the halls after witnessing some supernatural events even skeptism can’t deny. For no reason they walk into a room labeled "Vanacutt’s Office."

Even though the movie has embodiments of the seemingly unstoppable teen-slasher flicks, it is indeed scary, although those scenes are limited to less than a handful. Some of the cinematography in this movie is absolutely amazing and incredibly effective, but plainly plagiarized. Well at least the movie is far, far better than The Haunting, the horror genre’s last ill-faint attempt.

I thought this movie was a decent scare, but it all came down to an ending that made me weep with disappointment. A movie that was so witty, so effective, it almost strayed from the laid path of nineties horror movies, but then in stopped dead in it’s tracks. In the end it relied on the basic structure of a Scream movie.

Maybe Hollywood is just afraid to be creative, to not conform. History will prove, risk takers come off with the masterpieces. In the end, if you have any standards for the movies you watch, you can pretty much rest assured on a premature departure.

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