House on Haunted Hill

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	1959
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	William Castle
Genre:	Old school frightener
Starring:	Vincent Price, Carol Ohmart, Richard Long, Alan Marshal,  Carolyn Craig
Rating:	3/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051744/
Tagline:	The 13 Greatest SHOCKS ever seen!
Favourite line:	"Once, the door is locked, there is no way out. The windows have bars the jail would be proud of and the only door to the outside locks like a vault."

Legendary shock-meister William Castle’s most famous film.

The plot:
An eccentric millionaire businessman, Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) invites five people to his mansion, and offers them $10,000.
All they have to do to earn the cash is survive the night……

As simple as it gets in terms of premise, this was remade in 1999, to reasonable effect.
With a modest budget, even for the time, Castle put most of the financial clout into the salary of Price, leaving scant remaining for tricky little things like special effects, set design and the like, especially considering the necessity for Castle’s infamous marketing techniques.
Like The Tingler, to be released later the same year, Castle chose to give cinema goers a genuine shock in the auditorium. With The Tingler, Castle paid for several cinemas to have their seating wired up to a power supply so that, at appropriate times during the screening, the audience would actually receive a small electric shock as they were watching. Here, he had selected cinemas install pulley mechanisms so that, again orchestrated by events on screen, a life-size skeleton would be made to fly around the theatre, scaring the bejeesus out of the unsuspecting public.
Fabulous concepts, and real innovation for the time, meaning that his movies were roaring successes, their low budgets compared to takings resulting in huge profits.
As for the actual film itself, away from the gimmickry, this is pretty hammy, hokey horror, very much of its time, that has lost all of its power to shock or scare and, in fact, has the feel of an above average episode of Scooby Doo.
A retro pleasure, and no mistake, but one that only hardcore horror aficionados will really get anything out of, I suspect.