Return to House on Haunted Hill

Why would anyone want to return to the house on haunted hill? In the first film, various good-looking actors and actresses were killed by glossy ghosts who moved through an increasingly-annoying spastic frame rate manipulation that resembled stop-motion. Gruesome deaths too. One woman was put through an autopsy. Again, why would anyone return? The annoying frame rate returned, sadly.

The simple sleep-in-the-house-one-night-and-you-get-paid plot line of the original has been done away with in favor of some needlessly complicated affair involving an archaeology student hunting for a mystic urn (aren't they all mystic) before she's killed by a classmate mercenary also hunting for the urn and the quest is taken up by her successful magazine-editor sister and teacher and blah blah blah.

The biggest flaw in the beginning of Return to House on Haunted Hill (aside from that obtuse name) is it takes too long to get into the house. Since the audience is privy to the character's lives before they make the trip to the house on the hill, and the decisions and circumstances that bring them, we don't gain better insight into the characters to make them more sympathetic, just how stupid they are to even consider going to the goddamn house for so cliche and unnecessary a MacGuffin.

Once everyone is situated in the house, things move briskly (one hour to kill approximately 12 characters) and any established characterization is abandoned for copious amounts of gore. Since Return is a direct-to-video B-movie, all we're really asking for is gory kills and shamefully voyeuristic shots of boobies. This movie delivers. Well, at least at first.

The first major kill involves a ghost who was given a riff on "The Cask of Amontillado" and reaches through his makeshift mausoleum wall and gruesomely into someone's stomach, gripping their muscle and flesh like a handle, slamming them against the wall repeatedly. Nasty and brutal. The practical effects were quite good as well, which I'm always happy to see.



The second kill though; the second kill basically makes the damn movie and is almost solely responsible for the rating at the end of the review. I'm not going to spoil, but rest assured it includes great monster make-up, two naked women, forbidden lesbian trysts, and a great face-slashing effect. It's nasty, guilty, extremely voyeuristic, and everything a good exploitation flick should be.

It's a shame when the movie goes downhill afterward. As exploitative as Return can be, the later kills devolve into quick, clean affairs devoid of any scares or suspense and too reliant on poor CGI effects to resemble anything other than a video game. At this point, interest in the story could make the movie still watchable, but stupid adults acting as teenagers and chasing a mystical urn with ties to ancient evil is boring in the very best of circumstances.



Return to House on Haunted Hill limps its way to a lackluster conclusion and I was struggling for a reason to care. Being only 80 minutes long is pretty much the sole reason to finish. Gotta love short runtimes on boring exploitation films. Aside from the two kills in the middle of the movie, there'd be almost no reason to watch in the first place. The aforementioned 80 minutes goes a long way to recommend it for party or abbreviated viewing. Give it a shot.

** out of ****