This movie follows in the footsteps of the original Vincent Price and its remake a few years back. While the remake was nothing special, it was at least fun and made an effort to set up its premise with a back story. Return to House on Haunted Hill simply rides its back and tosses a motley cast of morons inside the forbidding walls of the crumbling asylum so that they may meet their ends for our supposed pleasure. How they go is sometimes gruesome, and always the same old contrived crap intended to make teenage girls "shriek" as if they were actually frightened.
First off, a band of mercenary-type guys (and one annoying chick who tries - unsuccessfully - way too hard to be deviantly sexy ) working for a former grad student - (uh, yeah, anyway...) as well as a pretty female lead seeming in love with the photographer she only met that same day (and acts as if she's loved him for years) walk on to the set and start acting like a cross between the cast of Aliens and Beverly Hills 90210. The haunting is given only minimal explanation, and poor Jeffrey Combs simply pops in and out of his scenes (as if we are still scared by this special effect alone)looking very much like he wishes he were making another Re-Animator movie instead.
Yet AGAIN, a perfect example of great lighting, filming, and all of the above - BUT - without ANY story whatsoever, and therefore no audience concern for anything that's going on or any of the characters it's happening to. This was a series of scenes conceived and filmed seemingly apart from one another with the expectation that the story from the previous movie would tie them together. It fails miserably. I truly wanted to turn this off after a half an hour but, as with most current and recent horror flicks, I hoped it would somehow redeem itself but it never did. If shambling nurses and old asylums are going to be scary, it is not going to happen without setting the background and adhering to at least the semblance of a storyline. The sheer ridiculousness is spotlighted by the fact that these characters seem strut around trying to look sexy and tough in the face of certain death, hoisting weapons of every sort as if bullets will save them from what they, themselves refer to as a haunted house.
Now I know why this one slipped by so quickly that I had almost forgotten it existed. Now I will endeavor to do just that. Garbage - avoid, even fans of the genre will be sorely disappointed by this "Return". In fact, fans of the genre will see right through this blatant attempt at cash right away.
2 out of ten stars only because, as stated before, they might have had something here if only they'd paid attention to some - ANY - storyline beyond the cartoonish idea of an Indiana Jones-like professor (who comes off more like Ned Flanders) chasing some demonic statue. Good lord, even remembering it is making me cringe.
First off, a band of mercenary-type guys (and one annoying chick who tries - unsuccessfully - way too hard to be deviantly sexy ) working for a former grad student - (uh, yeah, anyway...) as well as a pretty female lead seeming in love with the photographer she only met that same day (and acts as if she's loved him for years) walk on to the set and start acting like a cross between the cast of Aliens and Beverly Hills 90210. The haunting is given only minimal explanation, and poor Jeffrey Combs simply pops in and out of his scenes (as if we are still scared by this special effect alone)looking very much like he wishes he were making another Re-Animator movie instead.
Yet AGAIN, a perfect example of great lighting, filming, and all of the above - BUT - without ANY story whatsoever, and therefore no audience concern for anything that's going on or any of the characters it's happening to. This was a series of scenes conceived and filmed seemingly apart from one another with the expectation that the story from the previous movie would tie them together. It fails miserably. I truly wanted to turn this off after a half an hour but, as with most current and recent horror flicks, I hoped it would somehow redeem itself but it never did. If shambling nurses and old asylums are going to be scary, it is not going to happen without setting the background and adhering to at least the semblance of a storyline. The sheer ridiculousness is spotlighted by the fact that these characters seem strut around trying to look sexy and tough in the face of certain death, hoisting weapons of every sort as if bullets will save them from what they, themselves refer to as a haunted house.
Now I know why this one slipped by so quickly that I had almost forgotten it existed. Now I will endeavor to do just that. Garbage - avoid, even fans of the genre will be sorely disappointed by this "Return". In fact, fans of the genre will see right through this blatant attempt at cash right away.
2 out of ten stars only because, as stated before, they might have had something here if only they'd paid attention to some - ANY - storyline beyond the cartoonish idea of an Indiana Jones-like professor (who comes off more like Ned Flanders) chasing some demonic statue. Good lord, even remembering it is making me cringe.