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 They say that Vincent Price is "wonderful" and that he owns an "old, dark and
evil mansion located on a haunted hill." Several of his "enemies" are "bribed"
with $10,000 to spend the night in the mansion. They are all given guns and
then Price lets loose some gadgets to "frighten his visitors into using their
weapons." One of "producer/director William Castle's best films." 1958, 75 minutes, VHS
Okay, if you have ever seen this movie, you will realize that the dude writing
the copy for the back of the Diamond DVD (only $6.99) hasn't seen it . First
of all, Vincent Price does not own the mansion. He is
simply renting it for a party. Second, these aren't his enemies that he bribes
to stay there, but mostly strangers he has no relationship to. Third, he does
use a single gadget at the very end to take care of a little business, but all
the other stuff that happens isn't done by him. I guess when you pay $6.99 for
a DVD double feature, you should expect a $6.99 write up. In any event, the
movie opens with a floating head blathering about what a crappy haunted house
this place is and how everyone seems to suffer mysterious demises there. This
floating head belongs to Watson Pritchard, a sweaty little bundle of nerves
played by Elisha Cook, Jr. whom you may remember from his roles in The Maltese Falcon and Shane or his frequent guest appearances on Magnum, P.I. as the lovable Ice Pick. He's the owner of the house and his sister or
something was chopped up there awhile back, so you already know that when he's
bad mouthing the house, it's just because he's biased. After his floating head
gets done jibber jabbing, another, much more familiar head starts running its
flap. You should have no trouble placing that little, fancy mustache as
belonging
to that of one Vincent Price. Prices sets up the movie for us by saying
there's this party where he's invited some folks to spend the evening at this
supposedly haunted house and he will give $10,000 to each of the people that
make it through the night. Then we get introduced to the greedy dopes who have
taken him up on the offer. You got your psychiatrist who's broke, your gossip
columnist who's broke, your test pilot who's broke (but still has perfect
hair!) and your wimpy broad who's entire family was mauled by mountain lions
or something so she's the only breadwinner in the family and getting 10 grand
for farting around with Vincent Price in a haunted mansion is good work if you
can get it. Once at the mansion, everyone kind of introduces themselves to each other and
no one seems to have met Vincent Price's character, Frederick Loren. Even the
guy that really owns the house, Watson Pritchard, has only dealt with Loren and
rented the place out to him for this night through the mail. Where is Vinny?
Well, it turns out that he and his wife Annabelle are in one of the bedrooms of
the house (Easy! This is Vincent Price, not Ron Jeremy!) and they're having one
of those restrained arguments that creepy couples who are always trying to kill
each other are always having. He's joking around with her about how she tried
to
poison him and she's giggling about how his first eighteen wives have all had
heart attacks even though they were all nineteen years old or something. Each
of them seems to think the other is trying to kill them and eventually
Annabelle says she's not going down to the party. Vincent gets pissed saying
something like, "do you know how much it cost to have Hy-Vee cater this thing,
skank?" Then he "encourages" her to join the festivities with a hand around
her throat. She changes her mind and decides that yes, this haunted house
party does sound like fun, after all. So Vincent makes his appearance
downstairs and explains everything to everybody about staying the night and
once it hits midnight, there's no way in or out the house until the caretakers
arrive in the morning. Then a chandelier falls and almost kills Nora, the
homely scaredy cat that spends most of her screen time screaming and whining
about seeing ghosts and severed heads and the like. God, grow up, it's a haunted mansion! Do you think somebody is just going to give your ugly ass 10,000
smackeroos? You're going to have to earn it sister! Everyone's kind of like,
"whoa" and then this old lady gossip columnist starts getting blood dripping
on her hand from this nasty-looking stain on the ceiling. Watson immediately
pushes the panic button proclaiming that she had been marked by the ghosts in
the house. Watson would spend the remainder of the movie predicting that the
ghosts were going to get everyone. Umm, am I the only one who thinks we should
vote either him or Nora out of the house at the next tribal council?  Once the introductions are out of the way and somebody has slapped Nora silly,
Watson decides that what we need is a little tour of his humble abode. So it's
off to the basement of this fixer-upper and Watson informs us that they made
a lot wine down here and that explains all the barrels, racks of wine bottles,
and secret vat of acid hidden in the floor. To show us how dangerous it is, he
picks up a dead rat (man that must be some good wine!) and chucks it into the
pool of liquid. Of course, it bubbles and gurgles like it's consuming the
animal, so we know this acid is the real deal. That kind of made me wonder why
he just sort of half-assed threw it in there while the whole group was standing
right at the edge of it, but nobody seemed to get nailed by the splash, though
Nora
tried to fall in (Nora, the tribe has spoken, you are a total boob). This
apparently ended the tour (I guess if you've seen one dead rat eaten up by a
secret acid bath, you've seen 'em all) and everyone heads back upstairs.
Everyone that is but Nora and the hunky test pilot named Lance! Lance knows
his hair is all greased and ready for take off and a scared chicky is just the
way he's going to earn his wings on this flight! They stay and start looking
in doors (must be a waterbed in one of these rooms, thinks Lance) when suddenly
Lance disappears in one of the rooms that he went into. Nora spazs out and
sees a scary looking person floating around. Eventually the rest of the people
come to investigate and Lance is found in an empty room, blood coming from a
wound on his very tan and uncreased forehead. The most horrifying thing is how
his hair had been mussed! Oh, the humanity! So the doctor patches him up
with a stylish bandage and someone redoes his hair and Lance McHunkins is good
as new and ready for the hunt (where is that Mrs. Loren, anyway?). Meanwhile,
Nora is whining about seeing the ghostly woman and eventually it turns out that
it was just the caretaker's wife, Mrs. Slydes. She's blind, doesn't have the
decency to wear glasses to cover up her scary white eyes and someone needs to
introduce her to Lance's stylist, because her hair consists of a gray fright
wig. No one really explained why she just seemed to float everywhere, but I
think you and I know that once somebody goes blind all their other senses get
turned up several notches. Once all that has been settled down, Vincent Price's wife makes her appearance
at the party. Everyone except the test pilot yawns. Nora gets harassed some
more, this time finding a severed, greasy head in her suitcase (I don't
remember packing that!). Of course no one else sees it when she goes to show
everybody, so that they would see she's not crazy. It's almost like someone is
trying to drive
her insane... Then Lance is wandering around about to go upstairs and sees a
woman hanging from the ceiling or something. We are supposed to assume that it
was Nora that killed herself, but we all know it was really Vincent's wife,
Annabelle. Guess she really didn't want to go to the party after all. She
really could've saved everyone a lot of trouble if she'd just let Vincent
strangle her earlier. It's almost like maybe it wasn't a suicide at all... Of
course everyone suspects Vincent of killing Chandra or whatever her name was
and so Vincent busts out some of his party favors. In these little coffins are
guns for everyone! Everybody gets a gun and it's decided that they would all
stay in their respective rooms and shoot anyone that knocks on their door (now
this is my kind of party!) and wait until morning when the law can be called to
arrest, try and convict Vincent for his heinous crime. Which means that he's
not guilty so you know that somebody's doing some double dealing somewhere.
Who could it be? The test pilot who's angry that his hair got messed up? The
gossip columnist that is angry that she's so old and ugly? The psychiatrist
who is having a secret affair with Vincent Price's wife who faked her death in
an effort to drive Nora insane so that she would be crazy enough to shoot
Vincent with her party favor? Who indeed? I just feel like I'm missing
something here. Let's see, the test pilot, no his hair was fixed, the gossip -
wait a minute! Maybe the fact that the psychiatrist is helping the suddenly
revived Annabelle out of a hanging harness has something to do with it! So it
turns out that Vincent's wife has concocted an elaborate scheme that couldn't
ever possibly work (how do you plan to make Nora scared enough at the right
instant that she would just shoot Vincent? How do you make sure that Vincent
is there at that time? How do you make sure she has the gun when she needs
it?). Also, do you really think that you could outsmart Vincent Price in a
haunted house?  The movie wraps up with Nora shooting Price, Price almost getting dumped in the
acid bath by the doctor, the doctor getting dumped in, a skeleton rising up
from the acid bath, and the skeleton pushing Annabelle into the acid. After
this we see Vincent come out from another room operating this rope and pulley
gizmo that acted to control the skeleton like some type of bony marionette. Ah,
the old
puppet-dumping-cheating-wife-into-the-secret-acid-bath-in-the-haunted-mansion
gag! I love that one. It turns out that Vinny knew they were trying to kill
him so he loaded Nora's gun with blanks (apparently he knew their plan as well
as they did), then he offed those two. Vincent says that he's ready to face
justice and to let it decide whether he's guilty of anything besides the
occasional melodramatic speech. Then Watson gets his two cents worth in before
the movie ends saying the house had claimed two more victims and that anyone
else could be next...even you! Not likely, see, I don't even know what state
your stupid haunted house is in and I'm pretty sure that the only thing that
haunts my trailer is the dude that I owe 100 bucks to (I was so sure that 76ers
would sweep!). This is a really good effort from William Castle. We don't
have endure hardly any in-movie gimmicks like stupid camera tricks, or awful
music, or stunt-scenes like we had to endure in The Tingler (remember the color segment or the segment in the movie theatre?). They did a
good job of building suspense up about how threatening the house was and spaced
out the frights so that they remained effective and let us wonder what was
going to happen next and exactly what was going on in the house and who was
behind it. Nora got on my nerves, but the rest of the characters behaved like
adults, certainly unnerved by what was transpiring, but by no means panicking
or doing things that are just plain stupid like in a lot of these haunted
house movies. It was really nice to see everything explained away as some
murder plot (even if a bit unrealistic) instead of having some god-awful blah
blah about the supernatural and ghosts. Vincent Price turns in a good, strong
performance with most of the wimpiness we've seen in some of his other movies
gone. It was a pretty satisfying conclusion to watch him win the cat and mouse
game his wife and her lover were playing with him. The fact that all these
terrors were the product of a couple of demented people and not of unearthly
origin made things work better in the movie, because I think it is always more
interesting to see the monsters that reside within a jealous or angry person
than some idjit in a rubber mask. Besides I think most of us could attest that
spurned lovers and cheaters have the best capacity to come up with the nastiest
plots and schemes and have the emotional instability to try and carry them out
whatever the cost. This one is infinitely better than the cruddy 1999 remake
where, if memory serves (and I've tried to blot that movie out of my mind), the
house eventually came alive or something (or was that The Haunting? Or was that both of them?) William Castle exercises a great deal of
restraint in this movie and the results prove the old saw that less haunted
mansion is more haunted mansion.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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