Our Daily Trailer: HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1999)

So far, BAD's Plead Your Case Week has seen Evan going to bat for "Tyler Perry's unsung masterpiece," Meredith espousing the merits of "the cheesiest dance movie" of all time and Britt delivering an (admittedly very convincing) argument in favor of Josie And The Pussycats. Selecting which films we were going to defend wasn't easy - each member of the BAD staff seemed to have a number of titles they wanted to stick up for - but after much deliberation, I've settled on William Malone's House On Haunted Hill. Because if you're gonna go big, go big*.

Malone's House On Haunted Hill arrived in October of 1999, just three months after Jan de Bont's truly indefensible The Haunting** hit theaters. Beyond the obvious similarity in the films' titles, both movies share a number of basic story beats (a group of strangers are brought together in a haunted residence and find themselves ruthlessly attacked by evil CGI renderings until only two are left alive); so many, in fact, that audiences at the time had a bit of a hard time keeping track of which was which (the presence of Owen Wilson seemed to be most people's preferred method of distinction).

All things considered, I suppose that's only fair. But as a card-carrying member of the House On Haunted Hill Defense League***, the confusion has always rankled me: beyond the surface similarities and the titles, the two films really couldn't be any more dissimilar. Whereas de Bont's film goes for a modernized update on the classic haunted house tale, Malone's twists the formula in a number of weird (and often very creepy) ways. Whereas the cast of The Haunting plays it deadly straight, the assembled performers in House On Haunted Hill seem to know exactly what kind of cornball schlock they're actually starring in (and have fun with it!). Whereas The Haunting offers up a possibly sleepwalking Liam Neeson(s), House On Haunted Hill allows Geoffrey Rush to answer the question: "What would happen if James Woods dressed up as Vincent Price for Halloween?"

A lot of the love I have for Malone's film revolves around the casting. Rush, as usual, is endlessly entertaining as Stephen Price (OK, OK, we get it), a demented theme park owner and noted prankster whose latest stunt - holding a morbid birthday party for his wife, Evelyn (Famke Janssen), inside a reportedly haunted insane asylum - goes completely off the rails when it turns out the joint is just as haunted as its reputation suggests. We first meet Price as he gives a news crew a tour of his latest theme park attractions: a "Tower of Terror"-style ride built around a "Ha-Ha, you thought you were actually plummeting to your death!" gag, and a high-speed roller coaster that's...well, also built on a "Ha-Ha, you thought you were actually plummeting to your death!" gag.

So, fine, maybe Stephen Price isn't great at coming up with new ideas for his theme parks. But Rush is clearly having a ball in the role, sidling right on up to "camp" without ever fully crossing the line. For that, you're going to want to pay attention to a wildly miscast Chris Kattan as the caretaker of the titular House. Kattan/Kattan's character is annoying the moment he appears onscreen, and that doesn't let up for the rest of the movie. His role, minor as it is, isn't enough to cause any lasting damage, but whatever: his presence alone strikes me as interesting. Of all people, what is Chris Kattan doing here? And why bother hiring Lisa Loeb (!!!) to play a news reporter? And why is Spike-from-Buffy playing her cameraman? For every great decision that was made during the casting process, there's another pair that seems to have been made using a Mad Libs book and a copy of Details magazine from 1997. It's bonkers.

The rest of the cast (including Twitter-follower extraordinaire Taye Diggs, a pre-Heroes Ali Larter, the luxuriously-eyebrowed Peter Gallagher and Fuck Yeah Jeffrey Combs as the asylum's evil Dr. Vannacutt) is largely entertaining, and is given at least one memorable moment or set piece to scream through. Those set pieces, by the way, are another big reason I'll defend the film: there's the aforementioned pit stop at Price's amusement park, but there's also a grisly prologue/flashback from 1931 explaining what led to the asylum's becoming abandoned, a delightfully interminable "gathering of the characters" montage set to Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams" cover (oh, you can practically smell the late '90s), an attack by a stained glass window and an extended hallucination scene wherein Rush's character imagines himself being tortured and ultimately beheaded by sexy/grotesque nurses while inside a gigantic zoetrope (!!!).

All of this nonsense is threaded with William Malone's particular aesthetic, which involves a lot of the "shaky-head" effect first popularized by Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (first time I recall seeing it employed, however, was in a particularly nightmarish 1994 episode of Tales From The Crypt directed by...yup, William Malone) and a whole bunch of off-putting set design elements: dissected infants in glass cages, hellish electroshock therapy rooms, inexplicable vats of blood and so on. The film's definitely goofy, but it's also got these moments of genuine creepiness poking through that goofiness at regular intervals. Assuming this was done on purpose (and was not the result of, say, a director not having a firm grasp on the tone he wanted to set), it's a bold choice that has always paid off for me upon a rewatch. But alas, I appear to be in the (substantial) minority.

Which brings me to the following thought: I understand the arguments against House On Haunted Hill, but I disregard them. The film simply works for me, flaws and all. Yes, it's a tonal mishmash. Yes, the ending devolves into a total CGI clusterfuck. No, the plot itself doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny ("So, wait, the actual house deleted the guest list for Evelyn's party, replaced it with names of its choosing and then emailed said guest list out?"). But what of it? We all wrestle with guilty pleasure titles, even when most of us would agree that the term "guilty pleasure" is total bullshit: if it works for you, it works, so what's there to feel guilty over****?

I'll leave you with this, the opening prologue I mentioned above. Even if you hate everything else about House On Haunted Hill, I defy you to tell me this isn't a great little set piece. Oh, and fun fact: the guy getting the pencils shoved through his throat is the film's screenwriter, Dick Beebe. Make of that what you will.

* = FACT: At 27%, House On Haunted Hill has the lowest Rotten Tomato rating of any film being defended on BAD this week. See ***, below.

** = The Haunting holds a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes.

*** = Motto:  "Courage In The Face Of Certain Mockery"

**** = 100% valid unless your favorite guilty pleasure movie is The Haunting.