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A bunch of
crooks searching for a very valuable statue
take Sarah's sister and a bunch of other people hostage
so that they can help them locate the treasure. They
have no idea where it is, and the only lead they have
to go on is that it's somewhere within the walls of
the hill house. But as soon as everyone has entered
the house, the house goes into lockdown, and the terror
is set free once again.
Well this sure was a disappointment. After months of
buzz and years of waiting, the sequel to the awesome
remake (yeah, I loved the first movie and I'm not
ashamed to admit it) of The House On Haunted Hill is
upon us and man is it a dud or what? Now I don't have
a Bluray or HD-DVD player so I got stuck with the
unrated DVD version but I'm sure as hell hoping that
the "choose-your-own-continuation" thing is out of
this world as it seemed to me as if all the energy
went into creating that instead of coming up with an
exciting story. See, Return To House On Haunted Hill
(which I will now be referring to as Return) is nothing,
and I mean NOTHING, like its predecessor. This time
all the focus has gone into creating extreme gore
scenes and flashy ghosts whereas the first movie focused
on creating a great atmosphere and scaring the shit
out of its audience.
Return revolves around a bunch of crooks who have just
killed Sarah, the survivor of the Hill House massacre,
and taken her sister hostage along with some other
less important people. Why? Because they're looking
for the statue that contains all of the evil inside
the hill house of course! That's right people, an evil
statue is behind all of this. Sigh. You know how it
goes after that. The house goes into lockdown, people
get killed by the ghosts in the most ridiculous ways,
Sarah's sister has to fight two evils - will she
succeed? Well, as predictable and cliché dribbled as it
is, I think we all know the answer to that question.
No effort seemed to have went into this project at all.
The entire point of the movie seemed to have been to
create a groundbreaking DTV-movie where you can choose
what you want to happen next, and as I said before,
I really hope that it's worth it. At first sight, this
looks like a really good movie. Hell, I was even thinking
to myself; "why didn't this go to theatres?". Because
technically, Return looks great, it really looks like
a million bucks (well, more than that but you know what
I mean). The cast is also quite decent with some
familiar faces such as Cerina Vincent and Erik Palladino.
All of their talents are wasted though as the script
is so lousy that they don't even get an opportunity
to shine. Why they signed onto this project is just
beyond me. Again, I'm very disappointed.
In the end, Return isn't all bad but right now that's
all I can focus on as I'm so gravely disappointed by
it. It has none of the suspense or scares that the
first movie had nor does it have a very interesting
story. Jeffrey Combs is left in the background and
only pops up every once in a while to kill someone,
but he doesn't look nearly as terrifying as he did in
the first flick. If you're going to check this one
out, make sure you get the HD-DVD or Bluray disc as
I'm sure they're a whole lot more exciting than the
actual movie. This was just nonsense.
We get guts, skin peeled off, an arm ripped off, a head
crushed and a whole lot more. So not necessary.
The original theme-melody for the movie was underutilized
and generic suspense music had to fill in for it way
too often. I didn't like it.
Sure, DTV horror flicks are looking better and better
but why spend so much money on a movie if there's no
intention of making a good one? This was a half-assed
effort movie-wise and the only thing groundbreaking
about it is that you can choose how you want it to
play out. This feature is not available on DVD however
so most of us miss out on this. A huge disappointment
to me as this was just bad.
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