Return to House on Haunted Hill

(2007) **1/2

Sarah, the only survivor of the House on Haunted Hill remake, continues to maintain that vengeful ghosts were responsible for the murders that occurred there. No one believes her of course (I mean, I wouldn’t), however, mysterious circumstances surrounding the recent “suicide” of her sister Ariel and a secret diary Ariel mailed Sarah prior to Ariel’s suicide prompts a return to the house on Haunted Hill.

The diary in Sarah’s possession was written by the evil Dr. Vannacutt, who murdered many psychiatric patients in his Haunted Hill insane-asylum-you-only-see-in-the-movies. When treasure hunters kidnap Sarah, she learns that Dr. Vannacutt’s diary contains clues to a rare statue worth millions. The statue is located; yep you guessed it, somewhere in the bowels of Dr. Vannacutt’s towering asylum. Once in the condemned asylum, a self-locking mechanism imprisons Sarah, and all the nefarious treasure hunters. All this activity disturbs the restless spirits trapped within and one-by-one the treasure hunters’ meet grisly outcomes. Will Sarah find the statue in time to lay these spirits to rest once and for all?



Return to House on Haunted Hill was another empty experience. A decent budget with pretty good fx will help you get through this banal exercise, but RHHH violates one of the most basic of horror movie tenets, at least try to be scary. RHHH is never scary or even slightly suspenseful. Annoying characters get picked off one by one in various ways that never seem original. One character is torn apart my chains with strong echoes of any Hellraiser film. Another character begins making out with a hot chick only to watch said chick transform into a corpse in front of her eyes (The Shining, anyone?). Still another character has a refrigerator fall on her head squashing it like a zit on the nose of a 15-year old (see any Bugs Bunny cartoon). Good for Horrorthon numbers but not good for what ails ya.



After mailing this movie back to Netflix I read this online,

“According to Warner Bros, the direct to DVD sequel Return to House on Haunted Hill will introduce “navigational cinema” technology that will allow viewers to interact with the storyline. The High Definition release will include seven “viewer choices leading to over 90 iterations of the storyline.” What that means, we don’t exactly know. Sounds a little bit like a choose your own adventure type of thing.”

For the love of Pete I was unaware of this gimmick! It certainly would’ve made the film more fun, or even slightly fun.