Billionaire theme-park mogul Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush) loves designing thrill rides and is always trying to outdo himself. So when his wife (Famke Janssen) asks to have her birthday party at an abandoned psychiatric institute for the criminally insane, he sets out to make the evening a to-die-for experience. Price offers one million dollars to anyone who manages to remain (alive) until the morning. Things go smoothly until unforeseen demonic forces intervene and the staged game becomes deadly.
Price sets the tone for the evening by handing out guns to everyone (with the clips welded shut), and then suddenly locking everyone inside. Mayhem, obviously, ensues, and before long bodies are piling up all over the place. The problem is, who's killing whom, or is it all one of Mr. Price's cruel pranks? The creators of this flick tend to go a bit overboard on the spooky theatrics. Malone tosses wandering lunatics, mad doctors, and hell's spawn into the mix right off the bat, which then makes it all that much more difficult to maintain an air of unease throughout.
House on Haunted Hill is the kind of horror movie that's not a bit scary and quite a bit gross. Hence I watched a fair bit of it with my hands in front of my face. But hey I managed to watch last semester's Zombie so this was no problem.