1 out of 5

Director: William Malone

Despite some excellent visual ideas from director William Malone, House on Haunted Hill is just completely of its era, that early 2000s bleed of bland, flashy horror with gore and teens tossed in in excess. Which is too bad, because there’s some campy fun here, which almost seems like it’s going to be capitalized on – Malone gives us an intro to the house which greatly marries the Vincent Price era oohs and aahs of the genre with the color filters and wacky camera angles we started seeing around this time – and Geoffrey Rush’s and Famke Janssen’s love/hate chemistry (and Rush’s excellent characterization) are unique additions to the film which didn’t have to be there. They give us something outside of the predictable “let me explain my role” teen tropes that mug and one-line through the pointlessly twisty story. Alas, that intro is just that – an intro, a sadly under utilized Jeffrey Combs – and that relationship soon devolves into just another shruggy twist. That’s not to say the film isn’t fun in moments, and we expect these things to be dumb, it just shines a little bit of promise in our eyes and then becomes completely bland, even dropping the killer house angle in the last third for a completely unscary CGI boogeyman. Sometimes mixing promise with blandness is worse than just being disappointing all around.