House on Haunted Hill

     This is probably one of Vincent Price's best and most memorable performances. He plays Frederick Loren, a man with money, and a gorgeous wife, is very witty and eccentric and steals the show in every scene in which he is featured. His drop-dead (pardon the pun) wife Annabelle (played by the fabulous Carol Ohmart) is every bit as eccentric as her husband. They actually seem to have fun trying to kill each other. She once tried to poison him, and he tries to kill her with a shooting champagne cork, y'know the typical richer-than-rich husband and wife shenanigans. 

      Anyway, for the sheer fun of it, they decide to throw a haunted house party, so Frederick collects a wide variety of five or six people, a cross-section of sorts, consisting of Doctor to Typist and from Drunk to Jet Pilot. They have only one thing in common... they all need money. Apparently, again just for fun, he sweetens the deal by offering anyone who stays all night a hefty prize of $10,000. They are given the option to leave before the caretakers leave for the night, but due to the caretakers mysteriously leaving early, everyone becomes a prisoner in a house with steel bars on the windows, no electricity, no phone, and a door that locks like a vault. 

      The owner of the house is one of the party guests, a staggering drunk/tour guide named Watson Pritchard. He pretty much sets the scene by describing the murders in the house and the violent ghosts that now reside there. All deaths in the house are strange and unusual. One owner of the house was an experimenter with wines, but his bitchy wife thought it was no good, so he filled the wine vat with acid and threw her in. 

      One of the guests, an annoyingly screaming panicky mess of a woman named Nora Manning is being driven to the point of absolute hysteria by strange occurrences. She's warned by Annabelle Loren to watch her back because she's in danger, she is choked by an unknown person in the dark, and a bloody head appears in her suitcase. A side note that I always found fascinating when researching this actress is that she apparently died by gunshot, but I've never been able to find out the ultimate cause, whether it was suicide or homicide.  With the type of scream she has, my thoughts are that it was definitely a homicide.

       Due to the safety factor, all guests are given guns as party favors (an absolutely terrible idea). A few hours into the night, Annabelle Loren is found hanging by a rope over the staircase. It's at first presumed a suicide, but since there is nothing she could have climbed up on and jumped, it's deduced that it was murder. Clearly being the only one with a motive, Frederick is instantly accused, yet it doesn't truly seem to bother him much. 

      After seeing a very creepy ghostly appearance of Annabelle in Nora's window, Nora freaks, and runs. In fact, Nora does an awful lot of screaming and freaking out so when watching this movie, be prepared for a girl with a glass-shattering scream in almost every scene she's in. 

      While Annabelle is lying in state in one of the bedrooms, the Doctor walks in and starts talking to her as if she were alive. Soon Annabelle sits up and says "Get me out of this damned hanging harness". We soon learn that Doctor Trent and Annabelle Loren have been having a torrid affair and are planning to kill her husband Frederick before he kills her (after all, she is his fourth wife, all of which turned up dead of mysterious and undetermined causes). Their plot is to frighten Nora badly enough and to make her believe that Mr. Loren has it in for her. It works, and she shoots him the very next time she sees him, doing their dirty work for them. 

      Upon inspecting the scene to see if their little murder plot worked, the lights go out and Doctor Trent is tossed by somebody into the acid vat. When Annabelle hears the shot from the basement, she goes down to see how it went. Soon a skeleton emerges from the acid vat, speaking in Frederick's voice as he vows to kill her and take her with him. Scared shitless, she stumbles and falls into the wine vat herself. Sizzling sounds are quite overused in this movie by the way. Soon Frederick comes out from behind a door, revealing the skeleton to be a marionette puppet that he's controlling. He simply says to himself "Little did you two know that when you entered this game of murder, I was playing too." 

      When this movie premiered in theaters, a lighted skeleton would swoop over the audience when the skeleton in the movie is trying to kill Annabelle. Strangely, though the inside of the house has the perfect haunted house feel, the outside shots of the house reveal a very non-threatening, very modern geometric design. Oh well, the movie worked anyway. 

     Definitely one of director William Castle's better films, back in the day when he was still allowed to use gimmicks in movie theaters by using such devices as the flying skeleton.  He was eventually told that he couldn't use gimmicks like this anymore which seems like such a shame because it sounds like such fun.  Afterward, he hired Joan Crawford to be in his movies which I guess was the biggest gimmick he could have possibly come up with.  

     Since this film has now gone into the public domain, you can pretty much find it anywhere, from cheap DVD ripoffs sold at Walmart during the Halloween season to even a colorized version available on Youtube.  A true classic regardless.