Return to House on Haunted Hill
Directed by Victor Garcia
Dark Castle Entertainment

When the original remake of House on Haunted Hill was released I was ready to hate the film, but was surprised to find that the remake was humorous, gory and had an excellent performance by Jeffery Combs to please the diehard horror fans. I was slightly surprised to read that they were making a sequel but was curious to see where they would take the story because when you get right down to it the first film didn't even really have an ending, it just ended with the two surviving characters sitting on a very high ledge on the asylum wall. While the sequel isn't quite as good as the remake, it is an entertaining and extremely gory albeit by the books haunted house tale. But any film that shows a character getting their head squashed by a falling fridge is worth watching, right?

The entire plot of the movie basically revolves around something called the Baphomet idol. One of the survivors of the night, Sara, is planning to revisit the house with an archeologist to look for the idol but after it looks like she has committed suicide her sister becomes involved and is thrown in the middle of a conflict between the archeologist and one of his former students. Both are looking for the journal of the head doctor at the asylum which they believe holds the location of the idol. Without giving away much more, they all end up heading back to Hill House and surprise, surprise it is still very much haunted. The story does explain more about why the house is haunted and how the idol works into the story is an interesting twist but at the end of the day it is a fairly predictable haunted house romp.

While the haunted house genre really isn't known for over the top gore, someone must have forgotten to tell the f/x people working on this film and thankfully so. The ghosts in this movie are extremely pissed off and out for blood. Let's see what we have here. A man gets his intestines torn out before being pulled through a small hole in the wall. We also see another man drawn and quartered by bed sheets in graphic detail. The aforementioned fridge to head scene probably takes the cake as the most shocking gore moment in the film. The movie is surprisingly thick on the sauce and while a few of the deaths are a bit lacking, the vast majority of the cast meet a satisfying end.

While this certainly doesn't take the haunted house genre to new places, it is a satisfying movie with enough scares and gory deaths to hold your attention throughout. Let's hope that they dont go overboard with these sequels though. I'm hoping that Thirteen Ghosts 2 will not follow.

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