HouseOnHauntedHill Tagged Articles at Cinematical

There's only a few days left until Halloween, and your supply of DVDs might be running a little low. But SlashControl has a few classic horror films up to entertain you on these final, spooky nights, like the original House on Haunted Hill. If all you've ever seen is the 1999 remake, then you owe it to yourself to spend a night with some old school horror.

Modern viewers won't find Haunted Hill very scary, although I challenge you to watch the opening in the dark, alone, while wearing a pair of headphones. If you don't find the screams and moans a little unsettling in your isolated state, you have nerves of steel. I commend you!

But the fun of this classic isn't in its scares (which are few even for 1959 standards), it's all in Vincent Price's performance. The sadistic, spiky interaction between him and his beautiful wife Annabelle remains funny long after the ghosts have left the scene. (The sour marriage is also the high point of the 1999 remake. No one does gleeful nastiness like Geoffery Rush.) Their bitter bon mots stress that the horror of this film isn't the skeletons and severed heads, it's the depths to which people sink for money.

Watch House on Haunted Hill on SlashControl

If recreations aren't your thing and you've always wanted to own a genuine piece of Blade Runner history, today is your lucky day ... but it's going to cost you. Christie's Great Estates has announced that Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House (also known as The Blade Runner House), is officially up for sale. There is a $15 million price tag on the house, but the cultural landmark is still a bit of a fixer-upper, and renovation costs are estimated in the millions. Ennis House was built in 1924, but despite being one of the most famous landmarks in L.A., keeping the house standing has been proving more difficult over years.

Since it was first built, Ennis House has been crumbling thanks to earthquakes and rainstorms, but the movie landmark has been under the protection of a trust (whose members included Diane Keaton) for years. But when the expense of maintaining the house had become too much, the trust finally made the decision to sell. The trust's president was quoted as saying, "We've made a lot of progress, but a private owner with the right vision and sufficient resources can better preserve the house than we can." (Check out images of Ennis House below)



Ennis House has served as a backdrop for plenty of movies and television shows over the years, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Black Rain. Although, acting as the stand-in for the famed Replicant hunter's apartment was what put the home on the map for most movie buffs. $15 million is a little out of my price range, but I do wonder who will manage to snag the house first? Will it be a fan of architecture, or one serious sci-fi collector?

After the jump: a collection of Ennis House's greatest hits on the big screen.

Dark Castle Entertainment is an odd little beast of a production outfit. Headed by uber-producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, The Matrix), the company originally focused on horror remakes (House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax) and originals (Gothika, The Reaping). More recently they branched out to a wider variety of material (Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, Dominic Sena's Whiteout). Their next two projects, however, will be solidly horror-based.

ShockTilYouDrop reports that All Cheerleaders Die, a horror-comedy, and "another chapter in the House on Haunted Hill saga," possibly a prequel, are under development. No writers or directors are signed at this point. Evidently the company is also mulling over other sequels to properties they developed at Warner Brothers.

In October 2006, Dark Castle entered into an agreement with finance company CIT whereby CIT would finance 15 feature films over six years with a projected budget of $15-$40 million for each picture. According to the deal, Silver has has sole creative control, and Warner Brothers would distribute. RocknRolla and Whiteout were made under that deal, but Silver has recently been shopping RocknRolla around to other distributors, reportedly because Warner Brothers thought the flick was "very English."

Dark Castle has some turkeys on its resume, but who doesn't? I like their past emphasis on dark, brooding, adult-skewing horror, even if the films didn't always succeed. (And, really, who can deny the genuis of Paris Hilton in House of Wax?) So I'm cautiously optimistic about their upcoming projects. Do you have any feelings, one way or another?

Producer Joel Silver just made the equation crystal clear: If the direct-to-video Return to House on Haunted Hill is a success, then he'll probably churn out a few more just like it. So it's up to us now: If we don't want to be bothered with even more bargain bin cheese with titles like Return to Ghost Ship, House of Even More Wax, and The Reaping 2: The Reapening, then we should probably ignore Return to House on Haunted Hill when it hits DVD this September. Right? Who's with me?

Meh, who am I kidding? I'll give any horror flick an even chance, plus with the lowered expectations that come with a DTV sequel, we just might have something here. (Or maybe not.) The sequel to the remake of the 1959 William Castle production does come with a relatively colorful little ensemble: Jeffrey Combs, Cerina Vincent and Erik Palladino are among the bigger names. The director and the writer are both first-timers, so instead of being all snippy and dismissive about the generally well-established quality of DTV sequels (or lack thereof), I'll simply keep my fingers crossed and hope for a suitably entertaining little B-movie. (And it wouldn't have to be all that great to top the first House on Haunted Hill -- and by "the first" I mean "the remake.")

But seriously ... if Silver comes up with a sequel to Gothika, the gloves come off.

Old-school schlock-slinger William Castle was known for a whole lot of things ... but, for the most part, quality filmmaking was not one of 'em. He was, however, one helluva showman, constantly coming up with new in-theater gimmicks to keep his Saturday afternoon chiller flicks well-populated by thrill-seeking kids. One of Castle's best-known flicks is 1959's The Tingler, which was about a creature that lives within the human spinal cord, and starts, like, vibrating when its host gets extra scared. And to help sell the flick, Castle had these little doo-hickeys installed into the theater seats ... and they'd vibrate every time a scary part showed up! Neat-o!

So now that every horror movie from the past 33 years has officially been remade, it looks like the folks at Sony have tapped Feast writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to pen a remake of The Tingler. That's all the info we have so far, but the Feast boys seem to be pretty busy these days: Apparently they're also working on a draft of Saw 4 and have something called The Midnight Man on the way.

This is far from the first time a William Castle flick has been remade: 1959's House on Haunted Hill was remade in1999 and 1960's 13 Ghosts was remade two years later. Combine the best components of all four of those movies into one package, and you might have a really good horror flick.

My #1 favorite horror site, Bloody-Disgusting.com, is spending some solid time at Comic Con, and those bloodthirsty little kooks are reporting on every single horror-centric tidbit you could possibly imagine. In addition to their thorough obsession with Grind House, the BDboyz have also brought us the following news:

• A Saw 3 clip that seems more than a little Barker-esque. And another nasty poster. Coooool. Also, Saw 4 is almost certainly going to hit theaters next October. Yay.
  
• Wan & Whannell, creators of the original Saw, have their new flick, Dead Silence, almost finished.
• Feast (finally) hits DVD on October 17th. They better stick to the date.
• The trailer for Renny Harlin's The Covenant is now online.
• The House on Haunted Hill sequel we mentioned last week? Going direct-to-video.
• Lionsgate will release Ju-On: The Grudge 2 on DVD come October 10th. Strange coincidence: The Grudge 2 hits theaters on October 13th.
• Probably not anytime soon, but Sam Raimi assures us that the Evil Dead remake will happen eventually.
• Neil Marshall just dropped a juicy little teaser: The Descent 2 will be coming soon...

Who knew a comics convention would yield so much cinematic splatter? That's it: Next year, it's Comic Con for Weinberg.

Those gore-lovin' knuckleheads over at Bloody-Disgusting.com spent a few days on the set of Resident Evil: Extinction (surrounded by women like Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory and Ali Larter, those lucky bastards) and while they haven't come back with their full set report (which, frankly, doesn't even interest me all that much), they've gleaned a few choice nuggets from the cast and crew members.

Oded Fehr will be returning for RE3, and he dropped a vague little tidbit regarding a certain looming sequel: "From what I know ... they're writing one that's totally different, in a different time. Brendan (Fraser) and Rachel (Weisz) are in it." Hmph. The Mummy Returns Again? We'll see.

Stopping by to chat with Ms. Larter, the BD.com boys learned that she will not be reprising her role in the upcoming sequel to House on Haunted Hill -- even though she signed on to star in the second sequel to Resident Evil. Oh well, moving on, the gorehounds hit the mother lode when they sat down to chat with producer Jeremy Bolt, a guy who's made a lot of movies with the fanboy-controversial Paul W.S. Anderson. (Anderson directed Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil, and Alien vs. Predator, if you must know.) The partners' next project will be a "less parody, more reality TV" remake of Death Race 2000, an NES-to-celluloid rendition of Castlevania, and a sequel to this movie, which looks so sinfully bad that I can't wait to see it.

Back in 1999, three filmmakers named Gilbert Adler, Robert Zemeckis, and Joel Silver kick-started a horror flick production company called Dark Castle Entertainment, its moniker an homage to the late, great schlock-producer William Castle. The company's first flick was House on Haunted Hill, which was a remake of Castle's 1959 chiller. The boys then served another remake (13 Ghosts), a waterlogged original (Ghost Ship), a dry asylum thriller (Gothika), and ... another remake (House of Wax). (Their next flick is a religiously-themed Hilary Swank chiller The Reaping.) And now comes word that the Dark Castle boys have grown weary of the remakes. Now they're making sequels to remakes!

Now, I'm not sure how many horror fans even remember House on Haunted Hill, but I'll give you a reminder: It opened with a pretty amusing elevator gag before shoving its cast (Geoffrey Rush, Taye Diggs, Famke Janssen, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan) into a fairly standard haunted house set-up.

So yeah: They're making a sequel to that flick, and according to the often-reliable folks over at Bloody-Disgusting.com, Dark Castle has hired first-timer Victor Garcia to helm Return to House on Haunted Hill. No cast announcements just yet, but production will get underway this August ... in Bulgaria.