Pretty Good

Excellent but underrated film

An Exercise In Nonsense

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Return to House on Haunted Hill picks off from a few years after the original story. It actually focuses on the sister of one of the participants of the original film Sarah. Sarah has been killed in this film as she failed to cooperate with thugs with information about the house. This story involves around a valuable statue which is located in the heart of the house, which the thugs want.The beginning of the film did actually make me feel kind of sad as we learn about Sarah's murder (framed as suicide). I thought the acting of her sister Ariel was pretty poor. Considering that her sister had committed suicide (No one knows of her actually being murdered at this point, she only shed a few tears. After a few minutes she was fine.Ariel and her boyfriend then get kidnapped and taken at gunpoint to the house, to find the statue. Then the movie really does start to get a bit disturbing. There's a lot of gruesome scenes with some death of the characters. What i do like is how the characters get shown flashbacks of what the house was like before they die, i thought that was a clever idea.The main part of this story is mostly getting the statue and escaping the house. It tends to drag at this point. Yeah a few characters die in quite disturbing ways but nothing much else.Towards the last half hour of the film we actually learn that the statue holds the key on releasing all of the trapped spirits in the house. Again i thought that this was a clever twist of the story. The thought never came into my mind about.Overall i thought this film was a good sequel to the first story. You got to see more of the fantastic design inside and outside of the house. My complaints of the other film was that there wasn't much to see of the exterior design, but in this version there is a lot more shown. There is an awful lot of blood, guts and limbs thrown everywhere; which is always cool! I do recommend this movie but only after you have seen the original in 1999; as this is technically part 2.

Contrived sequel to the remake from eight years earlier (which didn't exactly call out for a follow up) starts out decently, but then progressively gets worse, as a group of obnoxious individuals that no one cares remotely about are forced to return to the house on Haunted Hill to find a Baphomet statue which no one cares remotely about either. Even at only 80 minutes, it still seems padded and slowly paced. The mutilated, lesbian ghost makeout session is the nadir of this barely-related, direct-to-DVD sequel to the 1999 remake of House On Haunted Hill. The 1999 remake was no prize winner, but offered a few more thrills than this dreck.Not even "so bad it's good", just terrible, contrived and convoluted, gory and ultimately rather pointless, because nobody cares about this film's MacGuffin. Its non-success has thankfully spared us Yet Another Return to House On Haunted Hill. I have a wonderful idea: how about if we never, ever, ever return the House on Haunted Hill again?

In the sequel to the 1999 remake, a new group of people descend into the house to search for an ancient statue of Baphomet, which is worth millions. They soon come face to face with the evil within the house and must fight to survive. They also find a way to tie into the first movie, but it's the usual for these types of sequels; a relative of someone from the original cast. This is definitely an inferior sequel to a far more superior horror movie. However, you really should not be expecting more from a straight-to-DVD sequel to a 7 year old movie (at the time of its release). The characters were fairly basic without much to care about, besides the main character and a few others. The acting actually was not that bad, it just doesn't seem great due to the writing at times. The gore factor was up, and while it was never cheap looking, some of it felt out of place and done to gross people out. The amazing score from the previous movie was missing, though slight pieces showed up in a revamped form. The score for this movie was weak and generic, without much ability to affect a scene like the original. The plot had potential and actually gave some answers to why the house was evil, but some of it seemed a bit too out there.I wouldn't say this movie is absolutely horrible; it does have some decent portions. The thing that hurts the movie the most is that it is a sequel to a brilliant horror movie which takes all the brilliance out and replaces it with gore. Another thing that seriously hurt the movie was the changes to the house itself, inside and outside. Besides some archive footage for the opening, when showing the house, it was a CGI model. They also changed the entrance of front where it is a noticeably different set up, yet it leads to the exact same lounge/lobby area from the first movie. They ignore all the other rooms featured in the house, and most of the ones in this movie seem out of place. I'm assuming the budget could not warrant a proper reconstruction of all the previous sets or filming at the Griffith Park Observatory (for the entrance). Had this been given a bigger budget and done by William Malone and Dick Bebe, I think it would have been just as amazing. Unfortunately, we're stuck with a mediocre sequel that is mildly entertaining when you ignore the differences between it and the first one. I would say I'm on the fence with this one, but leaning more towards disliking it.

Horror sequels are generally lazy attempts to cash in on a popular film's name, but "Return to House on Haunted Hill" hits a low that most franchises don't dip to until the fourth or fifth installment.After using a paper-thin premise to get a new lot of victims (complete with Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen wannabes) into the murderous house, the film dispenses with all attempts at characterization or suspense-building. Instead, it cuts straight to overacted deaths, lesbian ghosts, Mexican standoffs, and dialogue so bad hitting "mute" improves the film.Unfortunately, the money saved on screenwriters was not spent on special effects. Where the original film had half-seen figures jerkily moving across a screen in ways people don't, this has curvy girls in Halloween face paint that wouldn't have passed muster in 1982, pretending to be turned on and overcaffeinated.Upside: no 'cat scares.' Downside: no other scares, either.The filmmakers have no clue how to build tension by teasing viewers with hints and threats and things unseen, and instead just throw terrible effects on the screen every couple of minutes, or jump around to black-&-white footage of what they think passes for back story.Don't buy it. Don't watch it. For the love of all that is horror, don't encourage these hacks.