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House On Haunted Hill
[Raunchy Tonk]
1959; b&w
Directed by William Castle
Starring: Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Richard Long, Elisha Cook Jr., Carol Ohmart, Alan Marshal & Julie Mitchum
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In many respects House On Haunted Hill is the film that made William Castle a household name among horror and B-movie fans across the globe. In it Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who invites five people to spend the night at the sprawling stone mansion (in reality an awesome Frank Lloyd Wright house form the mid-'20s) on the aptly named Haunted Hill with the caveat that whoever makes it through the night with out meeting with an untimely demise will receive the tidy sum of $10,000. His guests (actually according to him the party is being hosted by his wife) are a jet pilot, a doctor, a socialite / gossip columnist, a secretary employed by one of his companies, and the actual owner of the house - a meek drunk who only spent one night in the place when he first purchased it and had to be carried out on a stretcher the following morning nearly dead from fright. (Price has merely rented the place from him for the night.) The house was the scene of seven murders over a period of decades, and each corpse supposedly has a nasty vengeful ghost that roams the place at night waiting for a guest or resident to kill, or at the very least terrorize. As the evening begins to unfold, we learn Price's wife has a mean streak of her own. Not only has she had numerous affairs, she's even tried to knock him off at least once. (Via poisoning.) Almost as soon as everyone arrives, weird stuff starts to happen: a chandelier falls to the ground nearly killing the secretary; the jet pilot gets a nasty gash on the noggin; and the ever-so-creepy looking servants disappear earlier than scheduled, leaving everyone locked in for the night whether they'd like to be or not. Soon enough we've got a body swinging from a noose and a cloud of suspicion hovering over Price, whose sinister side (mixed with a delicious dose of black humor) puts everyone on edge. But, as we all know from these films, a corpse isn't always a corpse and the main suspect isn't always the guilty party. The multiple twists and turns eventually result in two deaths, both by falls into the hydrochloric acid pit in the basement (doesn't every haunted house have one?) and Price waiting for justice to take it's course. But the real fun here is Castle's "Emergo-Vision" gimmick, which is a rather hilariously 'animated' skeleton. And by animated I mean it clearly has wires rigged up to it making it walk and move like a haphazard marionette. This special 50th Anniversary edition of HOHH makes me yearn for the opportunity to see gems like this on the big screen.
—the Kommandant
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