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House On Haunted Hill
R1 - America - Fox/Legend Films Review written by and copyright: Noor Razzak and Roger Nicholl (27th February 2006). |
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The Film
 The enjoyment I get from watching a film like House on Haunted Hill is like the enjoyment I get from reading an Agatha Christie novel, or from wallowing in the overdone melodrama of a Victorian horror. I love the stock characters, the body in the wall, the mysterious noises, and the monsterish house keepers. The genre may have moved on (or sideways, depending on your view point), so watching an old spooky house film now is kind of like seeing someone break dancing in a silver tracksuit (i.e. what once was half-cool is now retro-cool, or I just wasted five bucks at the second hand store). The plot is an old classic: A millionaire with mysterious motives (Vincent Price) invites a group of desperate strangers to a party at a haunted house and offers them $10,000 if they survive until morning. But is the house really haunted, and could the party have something to do with the fact the he and his wife would clearly murder each other if they could get away with it? The desperate strangers are your classically diverse lot. There’s the jet pilot, the noble secretary who has to support her whole family with a single pay packet, the drunk gossip columnist, the upstanding doctor, and the unapologetic doom-saying coward. All the actors do a good job; they seem to be past-their-prime b-movie actors rather than the up-and-coming-no-talents that you sometimes get in these sorts of films. Elisha Cook Jr. is excellent in the coward role, a role that’s well written by Robb White; his cowardice is understandable since he owns the house, has seen the ghosts, and his brother was killed there. This is a much more enjoyable basis for a character’s cowardice than the out-and-out coward a lot of movies favor. And Cook has a way of delivering those undermining prophesies of doom that don’t make you want to smack him like he’s a gloomy first year English lit major. Then, of course, there’s the great Vincent Price, the ultimate haunted house party host. He has the ability to make the most unpalatable thing sound rather charming, while having that undertone of malice. Even if he had you tied to a rack and was about to pour acid in your eye sockets, it would be hard to really be mad at him. And that is a talent. The world is lucky he didn’t decide to become a dictator of some Eastern European country. Damn lucky. Carol Ohmart as his wife matches him (a tough job). She manages to come across just as charmingly cruel as he does, without just being a bitch. Importantly, you can see enough underneath to understand how he could have wound up married to her. And you wouldn’t complain if she tied you to a rack either. To be sure, the film has flaws. And if you were watching this expecting to be scared, then you might consider them fatal. Can you dismiss the silliness of the scares? I don’t think you can entirely since the film is meant to be scary. After some of the hilarious early face-pulling it would be impossible to actually get spooked (one reason why I rate the film with a middling B rating). And I won’t say what the film’s big special effect is, but I will say that it wouldn’t fool anyone. Robb White‘s script uses all the classic haunted house movie tricks, but also has amusingly wry dialogue. It’s directed at a good pace by William Castle. Together they don’t let the film succumb to two of the haunted house genres big problems; too much walking down corridors, and too much sitting around talking about boring garbage. My only gripe is with one piece of story logic, which has to do with the relationships between the characters and the way in which the invites to the party were arranged (but to explain what it is would be a spoiler). Some films lose their effect and their appeal, others lose their effect but gain a different appeal. Maybe people never really found this stuff scary, and always found it just spooky fun. I can’t say, but I can say House on Haunted Hill has come down to us as a fun film. It has that unique atmosphere that the black and white horror films of this era had, and that’s something every film buff should sample at least once, even if it doesn’t scare them.
Video
Presented in a ratio of 1.33:1, this transfer appears to be open-matte, removing the black bars on the top and bottom that would have provided its original theatrical ratio. Off Color Films have included two versions on this disc: a colorized version and the original black and white. The color transfer was created by Legend Films. Using a relatively new 48-bit colorization process to achieve a final image in high definition or to film quality as stated in their official site. The overall color is of a high quality, it has certainly come a long way. You can clearly see that time and patience was taken in getting it right especially backgrounds and clothing, there is no evidence of color bleed so that’s a bonus, however colorization still has one major flaw, and that’s in getting the skin tones right, no matter how progressive this technology has come skin tones still look unnatural, remember in Batman (1989) when the Joker puts on his skin-color foundation to hide his hideous white face, it looks similar to that. Sharpness is nicely balanced however not entirely consistent, there are several instances where the prints’ age comes into play with several marks, blemishes abound. Blacks are deep but shadow detail is virtually none-existent, this appears to be an unfortunate byproduct of the colorization process perhaps. As a film fan I’d rather view the film in its original black and white version, just as the director had intended. However, this color version seems to tap into a market of viewers that for some reason dislike and would otherwise never watch a black and white film. Now for the black and white transfer, aside from the color this transfer is no different and suffers the same print flaws, marks, blemishes etc as the color version. However the back levels seem darker and shadow detail although not consistent is evident here. The image is generally sharp however all exterior shots seem softer and have more grain than interior shots; I’m not entirely sure why this is. Overall it’s a very good transfer for this film, considering I’ve seem many terrible versions offered on DVD before. Taking all this into consideration I'm still going to have to give this transfer an overall "F" even though it's a good quality transfer this film is not presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.78:1, something I cannot ever tolerate.
Audio
While previous Off Color releases have included an up-mixed DTS track, this release only has one track, a restored version of its original English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono track. It’s not a great track by any means, but it’s clean and offers little to no distortion. The track is free from pops, hiss, drop outs and crackle. All unfortunate problems that are commonly seen in films of this age, the track certainly lacks depth but the dialogue and music are clear and that is important. Unfortunately this release does not include any subtitles.
Extras
First up we have a feature-length audio commentary by Mike Nelson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame. In the same vein as his previous commentaries, Nelson generally pokes fun at the characters, the storyline and dialogue, and gives the film a rather good ribbing. Generally I find that his comedy gets a bit tired after a while, but in this case he seems to have one funny zinger after the next, the unfortunate thing is that there is quite a bit of silent space between those zingers. Although it would be nice to have a track where there were little gaps, I realise it’s hard to keep coming up with one funny comment after the next for an entire 75 minute period. If you liked the other tracks on the previous releases then you’ll probably get a kick out of this one too. Next up is the Original Press Book featurette which runs for 2 minutes 24 seconds. When I saw this extra I thought it would be a gallery of the pages from the book, instead we get a clip showing us the various pages. You can pause the clip if you want to read the pages, as sometimes they go by a little quick for you to get everything in. Also included on the disc are a series of theatrical trailers, we get two for House on Haunted Hill one in original black and white and the other in color both run for 1 minute 40 seconds, other trailers are all presented in color and include: - Carnival of Souls which runs for 2 minutes 27 seconds. - Night of the Living Dead which runs for 1 minute 8 seconds. - Reefer madness which runs for 2 minutes 3 seconds. - Three Stooges in Color which runs for 1 minute 5 seconds. Next up is some text information on Legend Colorization plus a demo reel that runs for 2 minutes 56 seconds showing a series of films that they have colorized. The disc also includes DVD-ROM content in the way of links to the Legend Films website. Rounding out the extras is an insert with a message from Mike Nelson congratulating you on the purchase of this DVD.
Overall
House on Haunted Hill is an entertaining haunted house film that doesn’t really scare, especially today’s audience but its fun and well written. The DVD presents the film with a decent enough black and white transfer and a color one for those that are afraid of black and white. The extras are thin but the commentary is really why you’d buy this release, well that and the fact that this transfer is probably the best one out there for this film.
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