Hey folks, Harry here with a cool little glimpse at the latest trailer that MovieView or the NRG is testing... this time up in Colorado. Well, it's the remake of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. But I was amused by something unrelated to film in this letter and that is that... Have you ever noticed how many of these scoops start off like PENTHOUSE FORUM letters? Now, given I know that I'm not making these up, it now forces me to confront the fact that perhaps Penthouse Forum letters are indeed real... and... I'm depressed.... Here's the scoop on the trailer...
Hi Harry,
I love your website, but I've never had a chance to write in about anything before (we don't usually get anything here in Colorado before other places do). But this weekend one of those mall survey people accosted me with what was actually an interesting opening line -- "do you like horror movies?" Well, of course I was intrigued.
They ended up showing me a trailer for The House on Haunted Hill. After seeing The Haunting this summer and being deeply disappointed (beautiful house, movie so completely not scary that someone would have had to drop ice down my back during it to make me jump), I'm a bit nervous about this one, since they are so similar plot-wise. I know, they are totally different movies, but a fair-size portion of both plots involves spending nights in a scary house.
The visual feast that was the house in The Haunting is the only thing that got me through that movie, and from the trailer I believe that even if the plot fails us in THoHH as well, I should be totally happy looking at the pretty pictures for an hour or two. Visually, the trailer reminded me of the City of Lost Children. As for the story, the trailer was disjointed and managed to pretty much completely avoid telling anything about the plot, just giving lots of quick, intriguing shots of things crawling out of the carpet, flashes of the characters walking around, weird, cadaverous looking people who were definitely menacing.
The house seems much more claustrophobic than the house in The Haunting. Lots of shots were of people crouching to get into small spaces, close-up camera angles that gave you the feeling that there wasn't much room behind the character to give them space.
Geoffrey Rush's character looked pretty serious, although he wasn't in the trailer for very long. Didn't appear to be mocking, though -- the brief flashes of him were played very straight. One line with him -- a female character saying, "are you doing this, Steven?" and Geoffrey Rush looking panicked and choking out, "no."
The person showing me the trailer and I couldn't figure out one thing: there is a series of scenes with a female character carrying a little camera, except the impression that I got was that it was showing her stuff going on behind the walls, but the person showing me the trailer thought she was watching something she had filmed earlier. There was a definite other-dimension quality to the stuff going on on her camera, though, and she was commenting on it as if it was happening at that moment.
All-in-all, I have to say that I was far more intrigued by this trailer than anything in The Haunting. Certainly THoHH looks much more demented, which is always good.
Well, I hope this is useful or new to you in some way.
Anna Chronica.
