It Must Have Felt Great To Say "Sorry, Guys, We Couldn't Get Ali Larter; Her Standards Were Too High For Us"
One of the passages near the end of Gary Paulsen's The Hatchet relates how the main character kid, after being stranded in the wilderness and forced to subsist for so long on whatever non-food he could digest, could never again look at a supermarket the same way. He'd always remain dazzled by the array and availability of food, having for a period conditioned himself to eat, I dunno, rocks, with a side of smaller rocks. I can't remember.
Alone in the Dark was my filmic meal of rocks. Having chipped the teeth of my artistic sensibilities on the inedible granite of its inexcusable direction, I turned to the metaphorical waiter and said, "This analogy is getting pretty convoluted," to which he replied, "Sir," with a curt nod, and then revealed himself to be Uwe Boll in disguise, whereupon I wept. My point is that I can no longer watch even a pretty shitty film and say "Wow, this is awful," without quietly adding, "but at least it's not Alone in the Dark."
Return to House on Haunted Hill is pretty damned bad. But then again, we all knew that. It's a straight-to-video sequel to a remake of a Vincent Price movie. The exposition is wincingly, sound-mutingly awful, and the film lifts scenes directly from The Grudge in the first five minutes. It spends its introduction trying desperately to evoke Saw and Hostel, plaintively bleating "I can do torture too! Loooove meeeeee!"
But at least it's not Alone in the Dark.
The most depressing thing that happens in this film is when, maybe fifteen minutes in, the leader of a band of straight-to-video henchmen turns to the straight-to-video heroes and dramatically reveals that he is, in fact...
...Erik Palladino, otherwise known as ER's Dave Malucci. Still, he's by far the best actor in this thing, and he delivers his absurd dialogue with remarkable vigor for a guy who's muttering about evil statues and such.
Speaking of which: Producers, it's really not necessary to invent a convoluted backstory involving ancient cults and evil archaeologists in order to get people inside a haunted house. Getting people inside a haunted house is very easy.
1.) Start with some kids
2.) In the event that some of your actors are 35, have them all make vague references to being in college
3.) One says "Hey, look at that house"
4.) The geeky comic relief says "No way man, it's haunted"
5.) The jock says "Ha ha there's no such thing as ghosts" and maybe slaps the geeky guy on the back of the head
6.) The girl points out that hey, lol, maybe we can totally have sex in that house
Then they go in. And since about half of that dialogue happens in this movie anyway, maybe you can just go with that and conserve your ridiculousness budget for later next time.Instead, we wind up with a lot of expositive silliness, like a scene where the good archaeologist is arguing with the evil archaeologist, and the good one growls, "It belongs in a museum!" to which the bad guy unfortunately fails to respond "So do you!" And if you don't remember the reference, well, sir, kindly go back to Moscow, because America's greatest heroes are wasted on you.
The cast spends quite a bit of time walking around the house with a professor who explains each plot device as it prepares to kill somebody. "This," he'll say, still ignorant of the consequences of his own narration, "was the Acid-Lined Drill Room. It was fulls of drills, and some speculate that they may have been lined with acid! ...OH NO, THEY'RE ACTIVATING SOMEHOW! AAAAHHH!"
But hey, at least it's a narrative. The things that happen are held together by a plot that is stupid rather than no plot at all. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between a thing happening and another thing happening. This seems like it'd be a cornerstone not only of storytelling, but of basic human interpretation of events; as we now know, however, that's not always the case. At least this film is not Alone in the Dark.
