If only the rest of the film were this strong.
#House on haunted hill (1999 trailer) tv
It's worth noting that every aspect of this news reel - which, in another twist, is revealed to be part of an Unsolved Mysteries-style TV show called Terrifying But True - is absolutely perfect. Eventually the footage reveals itself to be part of an old-timey news reel ("A SANITARIUM OF SLAUGHTER", the accompanying news announcer helpfully shouts over images of charred corpses). Then things get kicked up a notch: one of the patients discovers the camera that was being used to film Vannacutt's latest bit of surgery, and the remainder of the sequence - the torture and murder of Vannacutt and his staff - is seen through that discarded camera's eye. The speed at which everything goes to hell is remarkable. Someone breaks out a pair of scissors, which is never a thing you want to see happen during a revolt inside an insane asylum. One of the good doctor's nurses is drowned, her clothes ripped off. Vanacutt panics, dives for a nearby switch, yanks it, and seals off every entry/exit point to the hospital. Roughly thirty seconds later, all hell breaks loose. The patients revolt, tearing the staff to pieces. A pair of nurses stand by, one of them filming the procedure, another assisting.
Vannacutt (the singular Jeffrey Combs) as he performs an unnecessary bit of surgery on one of his mentally-ill patients. Malone and screenwriter Dick Beebe (who makes a cameo here as the orderly who gets killed via pencils) throw us into the deep end almost immediately: one minute and eleven seconds into the movie, we're meeting Dr. I could present any number of my favorite House On Haunted Hill sequences to you today, but I've decided to focus on the film's opening, where we learn the origin story of the House, which is actually less a "house" and moreover "the Vannacutt Institute for the Criminally Insane". It's woefully dated (hello, inexplicable Lisa Loeb cameo!), the casting is all over the map (on the one hand, you've got Geoffrey Rush performing as James Woods doing Vincent Price on the other hand, Chris Kattan), it contains an egregious use of Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams" cover, many of the film's scariest sequences look like outtakes from an Orgy video, and the final act's half-baked CGI effects completely undermine all the spectacular set design and attention to detail that preceded them.Īny rational person would tell you that House On Haunted Hill is a bad movie. If we're going to speak honestly - and I think we should - I do not believe that William Malone's House On Haunted Hill (1999) is a bad movie.
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