![]() ![]() With just one exception, the decisions viewers have to make don't leave any sort of lasting impact, with each chunk of footage ending pretty much the same way no matter what you select. At least as far as I can tell, it's not like a Choose Your Own Adventure story where your choices cascade, with each step you take directly influencing the next. The promotional copy is kinda misleading, though the packaging claims that there are 96 different versions of the movie on here, but it really boils down to a set of seven questions, each giving the viewer two different choices. The movie can be watched in the same unrated cut that's floating around on DVD, but the Blu-ray and HD DVD versions also branch off and let the audience pick what course the story should take. One thing that helps Return to House on Haunted Hill stand out from the glut of other direct-to-video horror flicks is the way it puts viewers in control. Nah, it doesn't really rank any higher than "okay, I guess", but Return to House on Haunted Hill is pretty much the movie it sets out to be. ![]() Just for the hell of it, throw in some floating chairs, a Mexican standoff, and an Irene Miracle-ish wet T-shirt dive, and there's your movie. ![]() We're looking at a ghostly gunshot to the head, disemboweling, waifish lesbian ghosts, a botched facelift, bobbing for corpses, a brain-ectomy, linen-fu, film projector-fu, Kentucky fried zombies, a refidgamator so so messy, and a par-broiled badnik. Gripe about Return to House on Haunted Hill all you want, but at least it earns the "Unrated" banner on the top of the case. There's a good bit of completely shameless nudity, and with seasoned make-up effects vet Víctor García stepping behind the camera as a director for the first time, it kinda follows that there are barrel drums of blood and a hell of a lot of splatter. The movie's too short and much too fast paced to ever get boring, clocking in just over 70 minutes minus credits. Return to House on Haunted Hill doesn't have the wickedly charming cast and demented sense of humor of Malone's flick, but for a low-budget direct-to-video sequel, it knows the drill. Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs) and the deranged spirits of the nutjobs he and his staff cruelly butchered a lifetime ago knock 'em off one by one. They're all eventually locked inside anyway, and after splitting up to cover more ground in their search for the completely arbitrary Macguffi.I mean, Baphomet idol, the ghost of Dr. While that little bit of effort is appreciated, it doesn't really amount to anything. and one of his busty, kinda haggard, sexpot students (Cerina Vincent) in tow.įirst-time screenwriter William Massa throws in a couple of lightly-meta winks to horror fans, having one of his characters joke about whether or not it's all that great of an idea to split up in a haunted house, and one of the first things they set out to do once inside is disable the mechanism that locked down the Vannacutt Institute in the previous flick, hoping to stave off the whole spam-in-a-sanitarium thing. Richard Hammer, Desmond's one-time mentor, has spent decades searching for the statue in the hopes of lugging it over to a museum for all the world to see, with a quippy T.A. There's also Ariel Wolfe (Amanda Righetti), the gorgeous workaholic editor of a skin mag whose recently-offed sister Sara lost her mind escaping from the house a few years back, and she's shoved into the sanitarium at gunpoint with her photographer kinda-sorta-boyfriend. You've got your smarmy, heavily armed gun-for-hire Desmond (Erik Palladino) and his small army of thugs who are eyeing the finger-wagglingly- e-e-e-e-e-vil Baphomet idol in the hopes of pulling out a multimillion dollar payday for one of their clients. The story's pretty much a retread of what we got the last time around, with a gaggle of thinly-written characters once again marching into Vannacutt's haunted sanitarium. We're talking about a direct-to-video sequel to a remake, so some sort of ingenious, genre-rattling flick that redefines the face of horror.? Not so much. It was sopping with blood and latex guts, sure, but House on Haunted Hill was a thrill ride.a campy, cacklingly dark hell of a good time.įlash forward eight years, and now we're lookin' at Return to House on Haunted Hill, a title that should probably have a "the" in there somewhere. ![]() Yeah, I know this is one of the stalest analogies an armchair movie critic can throw out there, but William Malone's remake of the Vincent Price classic really felt like a rollercoaster ride. The original House on Haunted Hill - well, not the original, but you know what I mean - opened with a shot of a rollercoaster, and I don't think that was a coincidence. ![]()
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