best movie i've ever seen.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

As far as remakes go, I thought this was a pretty solid update. It kept to the spirit of the original, but at the same time did its own thing. The acting worked well and I was actually surprised by the amount of gore it had. I didn't remember it being that gory when I first watched it. While it wasn't too gratuitous there was enough there to sate the gorehound in me. Overall, it was a good blend of jump scare moments, gore, and a fairly solid story. One of the few things I didn't like about it was the constant flashing imagery. At times, it made it hard to concentrate on what was going on and distracting. I adore the original. It's in my Top 3 favorite Vincent Price films. The fact I didn't feel like this was tarnishing the name of the original caught me a bit off guard. Looking back I wonder if maybe that's why I didn't enjoy it as much the first time I saw it. It was also around that time period when I was sick and tired of remake after remake coming out. I think I may have gone in with a bit of pre-conceived hatred before I even viewed it.I'm glad I threw it on and watched it. I really enjoyed it, way more than I was expecting. It's far from perfect, but it's a solid film that I'll watch again. With that being said, I still don't think it's as good as the original. There was a lasting fun creepiness about that one that still holds up, which I don't think this one quite delivers on the same level. My Rating: 7/10

Manny's Movie Musings: a rich amusement park entrepreneur (played by Geoffrey Rush) and his wife invite people to join them for a night of "fun" inside the "House On Haunted Hill," which has a bloody and sinister past. Any guest who stays the whole night will be given a check for $1 million dollars. Before the guests can agree to the terms, steel shutters unexpectedly lock everybody in. Rush's games and ulterior motives will initiate events that he hopes will benefit him; but the evil within the building has other ideas. My most memorable, movie moment of "House On Haunted Hill" is the scene that shows the escaped, criminally insane patients killing the asylum staff. This movie is a mildly entertaining — if you are high on booze — and mostly silly piece of Hollywood crap that concentrates on style instead of substance. Oh, and the shenanigans are too many to count, but here is one: the evil is locked up by a brick wall, but it can go through floors and ceilings once it escapes. Yup, cocaine and pain killers flows freely in the entertainment business. It explains a lot of crappy movies, doesn't it?Mannysmemorablemoviemoments

I won't go into a full review, since there are countless others and they all say about the same thing, which is that the movie is actually pretty good until the last 5 or 10 minutes, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys scary movies. It really has a nice mix of suspense, horror, gore, and levity, without overdoing it on any of those, or with the special effects (except for the ending). The score is also pretty good, and I liked the use of Marilyn Manson's eerie remake of "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This". Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for the filmmakers that the house just be evil or haunted... someone involved with the film decided the "evil" should have some sort of actual form. I think that was a very bad idea, but it was a bad idea made much MUCH worse by some very cheesy fractal/mirrored CGI effects. Maybe they blew their budget on the set and the actors (quite possible), and didn't have enough left over to properly give form to the "evil" with CGI, so they just settled for what they could get. IMO it would've been much better if they'd never given any form to it at all. I gave this movie a rating of 7 in this review, but I'd really give it a 6.5 if I could. If not for the horrible turn the movie takes in the last 10 minutes, with the absurd mirrored fractal CGI effects, I'd actually have given it a 7.5 to an 8. Everybody's comments about the ending are spot on.... it's just a huge let down.Btw, that sun rising over the ocean at the end is a pretty big goof. The movie is set on the west coast, where the sun SETS over the ocean.

I imagine we're all products of our upbringing and environment. When I was about ten years old, the original "House on Haunted Hill" scared the bejeezus out of me and set the bar for horror films I'd see in the future. If you watch that movie today, a lot of it comes across as campy or cheesy, but there are still those subtle touches that manage to evoke a response, like the first time a female character turns around and experiences the frightful face of the home's caretaker looking like some evil monster.The reaction I got from this picture was - why did they even bother? It seems like a colossal waste of time, in fact, this is the second time I tried watching it, the first time I dropped out when it just seemed pointless to me. There doesn't seem to be any real rationale as to what should be the logic of the story. Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan) insists it's the house itself that's evil, whereas we see some guy Schecter running the operation from some crummy basement. Owner Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush) seems to be in on some of the house's mechanical gadgets but not others. It's no secret that Price and his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen) hate each other, but no sooner than it's revealed she's in cahoots with Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), she offs him unceremoniously. I just didn't get any of it.At least the picture paid some homage to the original movie. The principal character was named Price in deference to Vincent Price, the star of the 1959 film, and oddly enough, Rush had an eerie resemblance to the iconic actor. This story upped the ante on how much the surviving guests would receive if they made it in the house the entire night. Inflation must have taken the earlier ten thousand dollar award and raised it to a million. The coffin party favors with a gun inside was another connection, but after all that, it was pretty much a disaster to my thinking. If the idea was for the special effects to overwhelm the poor story line, I think that failed too. For all their simplicity, the effects in the original picture left a lot more to the imagination. With this one, I went right to sleep and not a single nightmare.