The Housing of Haunted Hill

Note to self: NO MORE SCARY MOVIES! I've hit Blair Witch, Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes, and now The Haunting of Hill House. Every time I come home to our apartment now, I expect ghosts to jump at me from behind doors. As if the ancient fossilizations and oozing liquids in our fridge aren't scary enough.

The premise is straight out of Clue. Eccentric amusement park owner Stephen Price (played by an ascot-sporting Geoffrey Rush), has some free time and money on his hands and a really strange relationship with his wife (Famke Jannsen). It's her birthday, and what better way to celebrate it than to rent out a haunted house on a hill, invite some guests, and see who survives the night.

The house, it seems, used to be a "hospital" for the criminally insane during the 1930s run by a guy who, if he wasn't a Nazi, probably just missed the Nazi application deadline or something. Suffice it to say the house has some pretty bad karma. Probably some bad rigor mortis odor too.

The "party" begins, and the guest list is standard: Stephen Price, his wife, the alcoholic guy who owns the haunted house (Chris Kattan), a really cute blond chick (RCBC), a moderately cute blond chick (MCBC), Dr. Blackburn (played by an actor who is undoubtedly the poor man's Jeff Goldblum), and "Puff" Eddie (Taye Diggs, who's getting vaguely fat). And of course, the characters start exploring the house, finding silly ways to separate themselves from the others just so they can get chopped up.

MCBC gets offed first, allowing Eddie and RCBC to flirt giddily; Chris Kattan provides laughter; and everybody spends the movie wondering whether Stephen Price is crazy or just acting it. Sort of like Hamlet, but, well, not. The thrill sequences are amazing (especially in the first few scenes) but we just don't care who gets chopped up. The characters are almost embarrassingly two-dimensional, and the lines are trite. For instance, Taye Diggs plays a suave black guy in Go, and wins us over by yelling, "Is your British ASS happy now?" Here, all he can come up with is, "I should have kept my ass at home." BO-ring. Haunting is saturated with lines like that: "There's GOT to be a way out of this house!" and "The house is alive, and we're going to be dead!" Miserable. The Haunting of Hill House is like Clue, yes, but waxes pretty clueless.