House on Haunted Hill (1999)

  I remember when this movie came out in theaters.  It was one of the first dates I ever went on, and y'all, I did not handle it well.  I was a total fucking brat and I would like to extend an apology to the boy who tried his best that day. 

Six strangers are issued invitations by Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush), a thrill ride entrepreneur, to celebrate his wife Evelyn's (Famke Janssen) birthday in the notoriously haunted Vannacutt House, a former asylum gutted by a fire that killed almost all patients and staff in 1931.  The prize for staying until dawn is a check for a million dollars, but surviving until then is no easy feat.

This is a remake of the classic Vincent Price House on Haunted Hill but I use the term remake loosely.  It keeps the central premise - a married couple trying to kill each other in ever so elaborate ways - but adds the extra backstory of an asylum run by sadists and actual evil spirits.  With such a small cast, every death needs to count, and it does a good job of ratcheting up the tension, only for a denouement that's so breathlessly dumb it robs the previous hour and a half of all bite.  Also, I kept waiting for specific scenes that I only later realized I was getting confused with 13 Ghosts, which came out in either 1999 or 2000.  So now I gotta watch that movie.

House on Haunted Hill is currently streaming on Tubi.