As a horror movie, Haunted Hill is sandwiched into that uncomfortable genre that always wants to be known as respectable. Filmmakers have tried to accomplish this by throwing unnecessary plot gimmicks into their films in an attempt to make them more intelligent, and so perhaps the most surprising thing about this one is how straightforward it is. Director Malone (TV's "Tales from the Crypt") and screenwriter Dick Beebe take everything from start to finish along the shortest possible path -- accounting for both the lack of confusing subplots and the 95-minute running time.

      Of course, there are the usual number of cinematic hiccups, including but not limited to shallow characters, bad dialogue, unexplained motives, and overblown special effects. At the top of the list of one-dimensional players is Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush), a billionaire theme park tycoon whose latest scheme is tossing a birthday bash for his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen) at the infamous House on Haunted Hill. A brief but edgy prologue sequence informs the audience that this is indeed a spooked residence: at one time it housed the sadistic Vannacutt Institute, a sanatorium which practiced less than reputable methods of healing.

      For the party, a quintet of down-and-outers are invited: there's Eddie (Taye Diggs), a former pro baseball player; Sara (Ali Larter), an assistant to a film production VP; Melissa (Bridgette Wilson), an out-of-work talk show host; Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), a small-time physician; and Watson Pritchett (Chris Kattan), current owner of the House on Haunted Hill. Price offers each of these nobodies a chance to earn one million dollars -- to collect, they have to spend the night in the mansion; if anyone dies or leaves, his or her share is divided amongst the remaining participants.

      Things are going fine until the house's lockdown mechanism is triggered, shutting everyone in. Soon Price's game is out of his hands, and the movie quickly falls into the standard pattern of thrills and chills. The characters begin to make excursions into the house's lower levels, each time narrowly surviving some encounter with the supernatural before retreating upstairs to yell at each other about it. The basements are cramped, cobwebbed sets splattered with blood and body parts while the main floor is a twisted art deco motif. But like all haunted houses, this one seems to have nixed any conventional interior design.

      The cast of Haunted Hill is nearly as diverse as the characters they play, and aside from Rush, none bears any significant screen presence. Thankfully, Rush is over the top in a flamboyant, cockeyed role that only wears thin near the end; Chris Kattan, star of "Saturday Night Live"'s A Night at the Roxbury, has a few worthwhile moments as the house's jittery caretaker; but everyone else is largely unremarkable. Arguably, it's because they don't have much to do besides stumble stone-facedly through corny lines and run from twisted computer animations.

      In some ways, this head-on approach works for director Malone and company. The other haunted house picture for 1999, The Haunting, wanted to back up its scares with a dicey back story, but that only made the film more confusing than reasonably frightening. On the other hand, the lack of substance gives House on Haunted Hill a gratuitous nature, as if Warner Brothers had some time to kill and some money to spend. In the end, that's what kills it, and even on Halloween weekend it's hard to find worth in this movie.

Craig Roush, 1999