Stars: Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan, Famke Janssen, Geoffrey Rush, Bridgette Wilson, Jeffrey Combs, Max Perlich, Ali Larter, Dick Beebe, Lisa Loeb, Peter Graves

Director: William Malone

Summary: A group of people are invited to stay for one night in a haunted house - the reward... a million dollars each.

Steven Price (a very hammy Rush) is a wealthy amusement park owner who invites several strangers to his shrewish wife's birthday party, this year held in the abandoned Vannacutt Institute for the Mentally Insane. There, he offers a prize of one million dollars to each party-goer who can spend the entire night in the creepy and cavernous building. As Mr. and Mrs. Price play a bitter game of cat and mouse, the guests begin to think there are more ominous forces at work, especially after the body count begins to creep higher and higher. A remake of the 1958 low-budgeter starring Vincent Price.

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House on Haunted Hillis one of the new breed of waste-no-time thrill machines, like Deep Blue Sea, and a particularly effective example at that. The plot is pure contrivance: For a party stunt, a wealthy amusement-park manufacturer (Geoffrey Rush) offers five people a million dollars if they spend the night in a former insane asylum where the patients murdered the sadistic staff. But it turns out the five people who arrive aren't the five he invited--did his wife (Famke Janssen), who hates him, make the switch? From there events unfold with a smart combination of human and supernatural machinations; spooky jolts are dispensed at regular, but not entirely predictable, intervals. The visual effects owe a considerable debt to Jacob's Ladder, a much more ambitious movie; House on Haunted Hilljust wants to get under your skin, and succeeds more than you'd expect. Rush is his entertainingly hammy self; Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter and Bridgette Wilson are attractive and reasonably straight-faced about it all; and Chris Kattan is genuinely funny as the house's neurotic owner. Some elements of the plot seem to have been lost in the editing process, but it hardly matters. More bothersome is that the scares go flat when computer effects take over at the end--the digital images just aren't as creepy as the more suggestive stuff that came before. But that's just the very end; most of the movie has a lot of momentum. Watch until the end of the credits for a final bit of eeriness. --Bret Fetzer, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Director Commentary, A Tale Of Two Houses, Deleted Scenes, Behind The Screams, Scenes From Escape From The House, Essays, Interactive Menus, Scene Access, Trailers, Web Events, Chat Room Access
Subtitles:	English
Year:	1999
Release Date:	August 14, 2000
Runtime:	89 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 018018
Label:	Dark Castle
Keywords:	Hill, House, General, Wide, Screen, Haunted, Thriller, Horror, Occult, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Horror/Occult