So fun fact: looks like they made a sequel to House On Haunted Hill (the 1999 version, not the 1959 one). And since it's on here, I bet you can guess the quality of it is. Let's begin.
We start with opening credits much like the first movie in that they look like they should be in a NIN or Marilyn Manson music video. That may in fact be the highlight of the movie. After that it starts with the sounds of a shower and an alarm clock starting to buzz at five. Then a rather good looking woman picks up her phone to a message from her sister. She then promptly deletes it without letting it finish. Seems pretty harsh, but since there's soft music playing in the background of all this she's probably the hero so there's gotta be a good reason. Cut to the woman getting to work and we find out she works for a porn magazine.
She talks to one of the photographers and we cut to a college lecture about some medieval demon worshipping cult. You'll also notice that this is not in anyway related to the haunted house that sits atop a hill and is mentioned in the title. The guy giving the lecture is selling a book and has been searching for the missing statue this cult worshipped. This is also not about a house but we're probably getting there. He also bangs one of the students that was in his lecture and gets interrupted by his assistant mid-fuck. Not really all that important, but it's worth pointing out that he doesn't even get all that pissed off and doesn't seem to go back to finish the job afterwards. That's just poor form.
Anyway, I forgot to mention, but the first woman's sister apparently shot herself sometime between leaving the message and that morning. The sister being one of the survivors from the first movie. Look at how neatly they tied it all together. Still no house, though. After ripping away the police tape, as relatives of suicide victims are allowed to do (obviously), the main girl and the photographer get into the apartment where she sees a girl that is definitely not Ali Larter playing Ali Larter's part for about two seconds before her head explodes from a gun shot. The ghost of not-Ali Larter then gives a message to her sister and they then run into the professor who is also there looking for the journal of the head doctor from the insane asylum that was the house on haunted hill. This does not sit well with our female lead for obvious reasons so her and the photographer leave.
Upon arriving back at her house, she decides to get over her sister's death by making out with the photographer. So they do that a bit before she leaves and goes inside. She then finds out that, the most shocking of all, the mail can be delivered in one day because she has the journal that her sister sent her already there waiting for her. This discovery is interrupted by a bunch of hired goons led by a guy that used to be on E.R. for a couple seasons. They must be the ones the professor tried to warn her about at her sister's apartment. After stealing the journal and kidnapping both our hero and the photographer, the goons finally take us all to the house on haunted hill in hopes of using the journal to find the demonic idol which the evil doctor from the insane asylum in the beginning of the 20th century had hidden away in a secret room in the basement. Makes sense. By the way, the movie is less than 90 minutes long and just getting to the title house takes more than 15. I get the feeling things are going to have to move pretty quickly from here on out considering how many hired goons are coming along for the ride.
Hey, look at that, the hired goons and heroes aren't the first to get to the house after all. It's the professor, slutty assistant, and not-funny comic relief assistant. Even more people to kill off in the next hour, what fun. Comic assistant does have one decent comeback when slutty assistant is trying to insult him by saying that he “wasn't listening, [he] was just looking at your breasts” so that's kinda funny, I'll give him that one. He also asks the, well one of the many, questions that anyone foolish enough to be watching this for the plot should be asking: how does a medieval demonic cult's statue from Europe end up in the basement of an insane asylum in California? The answer: because fuck you, that's why (not technically the answer, but it might as well be). Another question that might have been nice for someone to ask: how does a professor specializing in long extinct cults working at what I assume was a second or third rate school at best, have the funds to afford the “best treasure hunting equipment money can buy” (actual words spoken in this movie)? Books do not earn people that much money unless you're Stephen King and pump out about ten a year for 90 years. But instead of asking that, let's have not-funny assistant make a joke about the devices locating hollow spaces and then holding it up to slutty assistant's head. Hilariously distracting. It's also at this point that the other heroes and all the bad guys show up but don't actually go into the house yet (19 minutes in and only 3 people are inside the house). Some asinine reasoning on the part of “not good enough to have a career even though he was on E.R.” and they decide to leave the photographer outside with one of the goons while taking the girl inside to look around the house with them. Yeah, that's about as much sense as it makes to me too, but then again I'm not a mid-level henchman needing to delegate work to lower-level henchmen in order to assert dominance.
The college trio have begun to look around the house at this point (again, 20 minutes into a movie less than 90 minutes long) with large flashlights as well as fancy hallow space detecting equipment. Before I go any further, though, a new thing that's bugging me about this: hallow space detecting equipment? I know it'd be good for finding boarded up rooms or whatever and that's a place to start, but... isn't treasure hunting by nature a process of looking for spaces that are, you know, not empty and in fact have things in them? You know, the actual treasure? Anyway, that aside, they're going down to the basement to start the search when they hear someone upstairs coming into the house. Someone who then decides to do something which is completely against the rules of proper treasure hunting in a haunted insane asylum: they turn on the lights. This is a professor and two other college educated people in this search party and they didn't bother testing if the lights were working. Anyway, back upstairs they go to find the bad guys and it's revealed that Mr. ER is a former student of the professor who's turned to the dark side of treasure hunting or whatever. Oh, and they rip off Indiana Jones pretty much word for word. “This statue belongs in a museum, not in the hands of some private collector”. I think they did this on purpose... but it's just so poorly done that it feels cheap rather than as a proper tribute.
Oh snap! Looks like slutty assistant is actually sleeping with Mr. ER as well as the professor! And she explains her betrayal in the sluttiest way possible. Never mind that, for the moment, though; looks like main girl is trying to make a break for it. She doesn't make it, though, as the only girl in the hired goons gets in her way and says the line “you're going to leave without giving me a goodbye kiss?” Normally, I'd let that slide as just standard B-movie bad guy banter, but the only reason I know this movie exists is because I caught this part of it on TV before Halloween, and I know where this is heading. I'd just like to point out that this is pretty much the first line this woman has said in the entire time she's been around and there's nothing to indicate this is anything but standard B-movie bad guy banter. I've probably given away where this is going but it's still so ridiculously out of context you might be surprised. More important to the “plot” is the fact that the house is sealing itself shut again like it did in the first movie. It's also started bleeding out of the walls again, but no one seems to notice this so we move on to the simple fix of the lock-down problem by going to the master control room and shooting at it until it stops. I'm not sure that's how ten foot tall gears really work, but it seems to do the job.
Then they decide to split up to search the basement of a haunted house. Not-funny assistant even points out how stupid this is. Again, can't tell if they're intentionally referencing a far superior movie (in this case, Scream) or if the whole genre has become so self-referential that this is just acceptable dialogue. The answer, it would seem, is to drink until words like “genre” and “self-referential” aren't able to be processed by the brain let alone spelt correctly when trying to write them. They do, of course, split up. It also turns out that this movie isn't just a movie. It's a cautionary tale to MMA fighters all over the world. Not to stay away from trying to act (although we've had enough wrestlers try that that it would seem a fairly obvious point), but that the road post-championship is a dark and lowly place. After all, not-funny assistant recognizes one of the goons as a former UFC heavyweight champion. And then, after gaining a bit of camaraderie with him, tells the guy who is at least three times his size and a former professional fighter that he “fights like a girl”. Sense: you have none. Comedy for a movie: still doing it wrong.
The ghosts finally start to show up. And then disappear without killing anyone... or being scary in the slightest. Come on, ghosts, this is a sequel, you have to bring your A game and make things bigger and better or no one is going to take you seriously.
The professor, who is inexplicably being guarded during his portion of the search by slutty assistant, mopes for a bit and then the token black hired goon is the first to die (all pretty standard stuff), but not before he has a vision of a former inmate of the asylum being walled up inside a room for no particular reason. This makes no sense even in the context of “the doctor and all the people that ran the place were insane sadists that tortured their patients in inhumane ways when they were supposed to be helping them” because, frankly, there's nothing gained in the field of medicine by walling someone up and leaving them there no matter how crazy they are. But fuck it, it's a sequel and the bad guys always have to be worse in sequels Even... if it's the same bad guy, I guess. Anyway, some decent gore, bad acting, and a guy who is probably over six feet tall and around 200 pounds pulled through a hole in a wall roughly six inches across. For the first death in the movie (not counting the gun shot to not-Ali Lauter's head that you don't really see), I give it a C+ at best.
Now Mr. ER is trying to hit on the main girl. Even though he's freely admitted killing her sister. And has kidnapped her at gunpoint. And is holding her photographer boyfriend hostage (at gunpoint) outside. And while they're in the middle of searching for a demonic idol in a haunted house. If this were to work, this guy has some serious game. It doesn't work and we move on to the female goon searching her section of the place.
Now is the time to remember the whole completely out-of-nowhere lesbian angle from before. And to remember that this is a sequel to a horror movie so everything has to be played up a million times more than it should be in any rational exercise. And that this is probably fairly low budget all things considered so they'll be wanting something to hook people into it. BAM! Fully nude (for two of them) lesbian three-way with ghosts! Try and top that one, Paranormal Activity 3. To be fair, this is probably one of the better scenes in the movie and not just because of the porn implications. This is really a scene that speaks to the eternal and undying nature of true love in that, even in death, the two girls who were no doubt locked up in the asylum for no other reason than they preferred each other to men, were so strongly connected that their love survived even death and continued on for decades after their physical forms had passed on. Plus even after the obvious reveal that they're ghosts and not nearly as hot looking as they first appeared when they got naked and seduced the other girl they still would rather stay in their room with each other rather than get down to the important business of chasing after their victim and killing her. They leave that for the evil doctor who appears in the hallway and slices her face off with a scalpel. This death gets an A+ in that it involved naked lesbians (and actresses who clearly need to find better agents since their entire part in a terrible sequel to an only passably decent horror movie is “get naked, make out, wear make-up to look dead, make-out some more”), actually has decent implications for a love story if you want to think about it for a bit, and involves a face being sliced off and then sliding down to the floor while leaving the eyes and a ring of skin around each in place so you can watch the insides of the human head for a bit.
The main girl is then attacked by another ghost who gives her a vision of him leading the uprising against the evil doctor that caused the asylum to go up in flames killing everyone. This is despite the fact that they showed that scene in the first movie and he was nowhere to be seen in it and, in fact if I recall correctly, they showed a few completely different patients doing the “leading”. Continuity be damned, she comes out of her vision in a straight jacket because “fuck you, logic” seems to be the overall theme here. It's at this point that the main girl starts to believe in ghosts which, if you think about it, is going to cause her so much guilt afterwards since she basically started to ignore her sister that ended up dead because the sister said haunted shit happened to her at the house. Oh, and slutty assistant asks a question that makes you think not-funny assistant wasn't too far off with his hallow space detector: “how did she get [the straight jacket] on by herself?” A fine question, I suppose, if she hadn't arrived at the scene with the door open and Mr. ER standing over main girl. Really? Her mind goes straight to “she did it by herself” in that case?
Now the one goon and the photographer get called into the house. I'm going to jump ahead a bit because, like I said, I saw part of this before and say that it turns out they weren't being called into the house at all, it was the house doing it. Fair enough, the house does have the power to do stuff like that, but... there's really no reason for it. They might as well have just all gone inside at once in the first place. This is made even more ludicrous by the fact that (very shortly) the main girl is going to escape from the house only to find that the photographer is no longer outside, and then she'll turn around and go right back in after the house opens a specific door for her while it's in lock down. That's nine kinds of retarded for five different reasons. Why not make things simpler by: 1. bringing everyone into the house at once; 2. not having her escape and then 3. not have her go back in to save her friend instead of going for help on the outside. Stupid people are stupid. And I don't mean her for getting away and then going back in (although that is true too), I mean the people in charge of writing this and just letting that happen.
Anyway, before the escape but somehow in the five seconds it would take to get out of a van and into a house when you're parked right outside the front door, the UFC champion gets dismembered by ghosts pulling on sheets tied around his arms and legs. All this in front of not-funny assistant so he now believes in ghosts, too. This death gets a B+ because it's pretty awesome but when they pull off the first arm the effects look like they haven't advanced since the original Dawn Of The Dead and, on top of that, the next part where all three other sections are pulled away at once splattering him everywhere is just not physically possible because he basically liquifies with no solid chunks of flesh anywhere to be seen. At least they could have given us some ghosts swinging improvised bolas made out of sheets and UFC champion body parts. It only seems logical in this context. Then everyone else gets into the main room and we have the “I escaped but I'm going back in to save my friends” bit. On top of all the things I mentioned above, this is also dumb because she picks up a gun out of the van to bring back in with her to fight against ghosts. Yeah, think about that. Anyway, officially halfway through the movie and there are still seven people left alive. Either this gets really bloody really fast or we end up with more survivors than any movie like this deserves. Seriously, I think there were only like seven people total in the first movie and three or four of them were dead by this point.
Mr. ER goes on a bit of a rant about how he still doesn't believe in ghosts and there “has to be some reasonable explanation for all this” and what have you. All the while one of the other nameless goons has wandered off on his own chasing a ghost. You can imagine how this turns out. In this case, he's taken in by what would appear to be a hot girl in a Sexy Nurse outfit that decided to wear Heath Ledger's Joker make-up three years before Dark Knight was made. You're picturing the scene where The Joker is dressed up as a nurse, aren't you? Well just to get that out of your mind, this death ends up being Ray Liotta-style in Hannibal in that the guy's skull is removed and the brain taken out. All while sexy female Joker films it with an old-timey movie camera. B on this one just because I can't remember if Hannibal came out as a movie before this (I'm almost sure it did) so the death might be a rip-off of that, but they still have The Joker's make-up before Dark Knight (and possibly before Batman Begins as well) so that counts for something.
And now everyone's favourite game: How Do You Know This Movie Came Out After Tarantino Started Making Movies? The answer, as it usually is in cases like this, is there's a Mexican stand-off scene that is eerily similar to the one in Reservoir Dogs/True Romance/Pulp Fiction/etc. Plus this is a sequel to a movie made well after all of those ones, so obviously this had to have been made after Tarantino started influencing every movie ever, but thanks for playing.
Then some stuff where they plan their escape route through the sewer and where main girl (after successfully winning a Mexican standoff against people with far more knowledge and experience with firearms than the average editor of a porn magazine is likely to have) takes charge. Then some more stuff to try and advance this “plot” about the idol along and set up what's obviously going to be the final battlefield (a crematorium that just happens to be in the basement of the house). I've honestly lost interest in this movie. Again. Remember: I said I only caught part of it on TV. And after the lesbian threesome that, frankly, if they'd expanded it to be some sort of “controversial, boundary pushing, Brokeback Asylum” movie, would've made for a better story than this one, I only watched for a while, zoned out, and then flipped over to Simpsons or Family Guy or something.
Now the professor is going on about how the evil doctor was once a great man and then he became evil after he gained possession of the demonic statue. Let's just think about that for a second. This guy has spent basically his whole life looking for this statue. A statue that he knows authorities in the middle ages (granted it was the church and they don't have the best record when it comes to... well a lot of things, really) knew/believed to contain an “evil influence over men” (re: actually for serious demonically possessed). A statue that, when in possession of a “great man” like the evil doctor who was once a humanitarian who was even nominated for the Nobel Prize (doesn't mention in what field, though, and even if it was “peace”... well...), turned dear old doc into a butcher. Why the fuck would you want to find such a thing? The whole gist of his story seems to be that the statue corrupts anyone that seeks it out, so even if your motivation was “kill it with fire!” rather than “it should be in a museum”, actively looking for it sounds like it's going to turn you into a complete asshole once you find it. Granted you can't take superstitions from the middle ages seriously all the time, but if your assistant is making comments like “you don't seriously want us to split up in a haunted house?” and there are ghosts all over the place killing people, maybe you should think twice about ignoring ancient curses that involve evil spirits. Just saying.
A giant tank of water, some bullshit explanation, the vision of what it was used for, and the D death scene of not-funny comic relief assistant later, and we've got Mr. ER and slutty assistant run off to look for the demonic idol with main girl, photographer, and professor looking for a way out of the house alive. Still half an hour to go. I take back all my criticism of them not getting to the house soon enough, now I think they're spending too much time in the house. Also: for wearing a white tank top the entire movie and being soaked in either rain or a giant tub of water, main girl seems to be magically resistant to every attempt at making this a movie based around a wet t-shirt contest where she's the only participant.
A quick “we're lost, why don't you pull over for directions?” style fight between ER and slutty (she's nagging about him not knowing how to read a map and he tells her he knows what he's doing and he'll find the crematorium) and all of a sudden he's pointing a gun at her. Women, right fellas? This is some terrible writing (not Midnight Horror Collection Vol. 3 terrible... but close) and terrible acting (let's be honest, when you're best known actor's main credit is he was one of the lesser guys on E.R. For a season or two... you might be in trouble talent-wise) combined. Slutty runs away and ends up having a fridge dropped on her because, at this point, even the ghosts are tired of trying to make sense in this movie. D- but only because having a fridge drop on and splatter someone's head is pretty cool regardless of how little sense it makes.
This is already too long so I'll try to make the last 20 minutes of the movie quick. The ghost that no one saw in the first movie but was apparently the leader of the insane tells main girl to destroy the statue because it's the only way to let all the spirits be free. The statue is inside a secret chamber inside one of the furnaces in the crematorium. They find the chamber and find... living tissue or something (like they're inside “a heart”) because everyone involved decided the rest of the movie wasn't a big enough 'fuck you' to the people watching it. They manage to get the statue and take it out (can't destroy it with their guns because... because they can't, that's why!), and take it out to the previously mentioned sewer grate to try to toss it away. Not before ER tries to stop them and ends up getting burned up in one of the furnaces, though (C+ on the death because it was obvious from the second they said there was a crematorium in the house that someone was going to get burned alive). At this point photographer gets separated from them and chased by ghosts back into the furnace that leads to the original statue chamber because why bother running through what seems to be an infinite number of passages in this house when you can willingly go into a furnace? Then the professor (who has always wanted the statue, remember) becomes possessed by its power and tries to kill the main girl. They fight (this time being drenched in “blood” rather than water so the wet t-shirt contest is still a no-go), every ghost in the history of ghosts shows up to watch (except those that are chasing the photographer), and main girl manages to overpower the professor so she can run over to the sewer grate with the idol only to find... The evil doctor's ghost waiting for her! If you look closely, you can even see the look in his eyes where he realizes that he has no future in acting and watch as his heart breaks at the notion. After that the doctor tosses main girl aside, goes all “ghosts can be passed through by the living” on the professor (who is now suddenly okay again), and then busies himself fighting the professor rather than dealing with main girl who, as you might recall, is the one holding the demonic idol that is the source of all his ghostly powers. This is a bad move on his part.
Evil doctor kills the professor, sexy Joker nurse inexplicably appears to be the one threatening the photographer, and then main girl suddenly regains consciousness with all her faculties in place so she can drop the statue into the sewer. The statue goes spewing out into the ocean, all the ghosts around the photographer turn into corpse dust, and suddenly the lead inmate ghost and a bunch of his cronies show up to confront the evil doctor's ghost. They surround and over power him again (side note: this is the only time any ghost ever says anything and it's a comical “George Lucas should stop fucking with Star Wars” kind of “no! ...NOOO! NOOOOO!!!!!”), and then they all turn into corpse dust too. The house opens up and we're left with one guy and one girl surviving all the way till morning just like in the first movie.
Except that, instead of the two survivors finding the promised one million dollar cheques and making it a good ending, we're left with some bullshit “there was evil trapped in that house and now we've set it free... you mean the house wanted us to succeed? ...I don't know” series of lines and then they drive off. It's also worth pointing out that there are two vehicles out front, neither of which actually belong to the two that survived. And there's no reason to assume (or even reasonably think) that the keys would be in either vehicle so that they can just get in and drive away. On top of that, remember that demonic idol that they just let drift off to sea? The one that apparently had so much power it could turn great men into psychopathic butchers and keep spirits trapped for decades? Whatever happened to that? Oh yeah, you let it wash out to fucking sea! What they fuck do you think is going to happen to it, and all the evil power it has, now? Fuck the both of you, you just made things worse. At least at the start of the movie all that evil was trapped in the house instead of out God knows where in the world. Plus, at the start of the movie, all this retarded shit about a medieval demonic statue had never happened and it was a simple haunted house story with ghosts killing people. Now look what you've done. Despicable.
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