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DVD House on Haunted Hill
William Castle's gimmick-laden comic thriller is not so much a horror movie as a fairground funhouse come to life. Vincent Price stars as a deliciously silky millionaire married to a greedy gold digger (Carol Ohmart) who refuses to divorce him. When he turns his wife's idea for a haunted-house party into a contest--$10,000 to whoever will spend the night in "the only truly haunted house in the world"--it seems he may have found an alternative to divorce. Five strangers gather to test their stamina, Price hands each of them delightfully twisted party favors (loaded handguns, delivered in their own tiny coffins), and the spook show begins. Blood drips from the ceiling, zombielike apparitions float through rooms, severed heads and skeletons suddenly appear, and then a guest is found hanging in the stairwell. Full of screams and things that go bump in the night, House on Haunted Hill isn't particularly scary and often makes little sense, but, like a Halloween haunted house, the spectacle of spook-show clichés is quite entertaining, and Price makes a sardonic master of ceremonies. The original theatrical presentations featured a typically outrageous Castle-engineered gimmick: Emergo, which was nothing more than a skeleton that appeared to fly out of the screen and over the audience on a guide wire. --Sean Axmaker
Fun Vincent Price thriller with funny new commentary by Mike Nelson.
House On Haunted Hill (HOHH) has been available for some time on a variety of DVD releases, including one budget release that was paired with another Vincent Price film, Last Man On Earth. While that budget release contained a widescreen version of HOHH, this new release from Legend Films does not. However, that is my only complaint about this disc. The quality of the print is quite good and the optional commentary track by Mike Nelson (former head writer and performer on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), available on Rhino DVD) is hilarious. While not as engaging as the full MST3K treatment, there are no host segments, sketches or buddies with whom to interact, Mr. Nelson's humor is sharp, entertaining and enjoyable.
House On Haunted Hill by itself is a fun film that is entertaining on repeated viewings. It is just so silly and full of campy "scares," yet it has a surprisingly good cast delivering solid performances in spite of the film's premise. The addition of Mike Nelson's commentary and the option of watching the film colorized will add to the repeat viewing value.
One really nice extra feature on this disc is that you can hear the funny commentary track while watching the original black and white version of the film as well as the colorized version; a nice treat for those film buffs and purists who dislike colorization. I hope Legend Films will include this option on future releases; I missed it on their Three Stooges release where one could only see the Film Crew host segments on the colorized track.
Whether you are a fan of old thrillers, an MST3K fan, or just a comedy fan who enjoys funny commentary, this disc should provide a lot of entertainment for a fairly modest price. Recommended.
I don't understand me no ASPECT RATIOS...
These other reviews are completely absurd. Either the reviewer is cluelessly ranting about how dumb they are....while others waste paragraph upon paragraph explaining the concept of aspect ratios (don't you chat enough on-line with other geeks that work at Radio Shack?).
The point is that the dvd is a brilliant release of a NEW color version of House of Huanted Hill for a VERY low price and that is what counts. It's an atmospheric Wiliam Castle classic that we all grew up with and still enjoy. Quality is fine for the price. HELLO! We have all scene it, we all love it, and we all want to collect it. Happy Halloween comes early this year.
Don't throw out your WB DVD version of this movie!
I was very disappointed that this DVD did not include a widescreen version (in either color or BW) as WB did in its DVD release (they had included both FS and WS versions).
While it was interesting to see what the movie looked like in color (the colorization was not bad), I did not think that it added anything to the film.
The restored BW version included on the DVD was very nice, just wish that it was done in WideScreen.
I don't know about all this "pre 1960 1:85 vs 1:33, and the 1:33 Fullscreen really has more info in it than the 1:85 widescreen' etc., stuff that the other reviewers are talking about.
All I know is that viewing "House on Haunted Hill" in the widescreen format that was included in the WB DVD release has much more of a visual impact watching it on my Widescreen TV than watching the Fullscreen versions (either color or the restored BW) included on this DVD.
Bottom line, if you are curious about the color, get this DVD, otherwise stick with your current WB FS/WS DVD edition.
House of Wax brought Vincent Price into the horror genre, where he fit as snugly as a scalpel in a mad scientist's hand. A remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, this entertaining Gothic shocker casts Price as a sculptor of wax figures; his unwilling victims--er, "models"--lend their bodies to his lifelike depictions of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. The film was one of the top 10 moneymakers of its year, thanks in part to the 3-D gimmick, which explains why so many things are aimed at the camera (why else would the paddleball man be there?). Footnote to history: director Andre De Toth was blind in one eye, and thus could not see in three dimensions.
Not at all a musty relic of the early-sound era, the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot in a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vincent Price - Frank Lovejoy Director(s): André De Toth DVD Release Date: Released the 05 August 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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PT Barnumish producer/director William Castle hit his stride in this 1959 classic. In theaters, he used a gimmick called PERCEPTO, which would send a little shock through selected seats in the theaters, causing some real frights to unsuspecting moviegoers.
The movie is really hard to believe, but it's done with such panache and Vincent Price is at his excellent hammiest best, it rates as a real horror classic. THE TINGLER is a physical embodiment of fear that looks like a centipede with claws and snaps the spinal cord of the victim IF they don't get to scream. Price is joined by Judith Evelyn as a deaf mute whose nerdy husband (the excellent Phillip Coolidge) decides to use this tingler effect to scare her to death and run off with her fortune. The movie has a classic sequence... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vincent Price - Judith Evelyn Director(s): William Castle DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Certain to remain one of the greatest haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades, because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (which also inspired the 1999 remake directed by Jan de Bont), the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion (actually filmed in England) that will play host to four daring guests determined to investigate--and hopefully debunk--the legacy of death and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying reputation.
This terrific haunted-house thriller proved an unforgettable experience for 1960 audiences. Set in the mansion of a deceased scientist named Dr. Zorba, the story finds the late occult practitioner's nephew discovering a bunch of elusive spooks on the premises that can be seen only through Zorba's ghost-viewing glasses. Produced and directed by legendary showman William Castle, master of such garish, audience-pleasing gimmicks as flying skeletons and electric-shock theater seats, 13 Ghosts was hyped with an innovative process called "Illusion-O." Movie patrons were furnished with special, red-and-blue-colored glasses that allowed them to choose to see the titular specters or not. This DVD does not provide a working replica of the Illusion-O viewer (earlier copies did), but it offers... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Herbert - Jo Morrow - Martin Milner Director(s): William Castle DVD Release Date: Released the 11 September 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The definitive screen adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the 1961 production of The Innocents remains one of the most effective ghost stories ever filmed. Originally promoted as the first truly "adult" chiller of the big screen (a marginally valid claim considering the release of Psycho a year earlier), the film arrived at a time when the thematic depth of James's story could finally be addressed without the compromise of reductive discretion. And while the Freudian anxiety that fuels the story may seem tame by today's standards, the psychological horrors that comprise the story's "dark secret" are given full expression in a film that brilliantly clouds the boundary between tragic reality and frightful imagination.
