Return to House on Haunted Hill

Ok, look: RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is as “B” as B movies get. It’s a direct-to-video sequel to the remake of a classic B horror film that few people saw (but that I enjoyed). It stars none of the major players from the previous effort, puts the gratuitous in “gratuitous nudity” (seriously – there are random shots of naked women that do absolutely nothing to advance the story and serve only to up the film’s boobs per minute ratio) and spends more money on creature design than story development. Nevertheless, this movie is something special. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the first Choose Your own Adventure “B” horror movie.

That’s right. During pivotal moments of the story, a menu pops up and asks viewers questions like, “Should the heroine save the wisecracking good guy or get the map?” and “Should the henchwoman resist the charms of the spectral lesbians?” The movie advertises 96 possible paths through the story, though I only tried three. One of the paths, the first one I tried, got me all the way to the end. The second one cut the story short, as everyone died a grisly death. The third got me to a different ending, but without the added helping of gratuitous nudity offered by the first (Somewhere along the line, I must have chosen poorly.). If the movie had been better, I may have been tempted to try a few more options. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bear to. The acting was so poor, the story so uninspired, the villains so dull, and the motivations of the ghosts and monsters so incomprehensible that I just couldn’t take it any more.

But I must admit a grudging respect for RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. It does sport some pretty cool creature designs. It unashamedly embraces its exploitative, B move pedigree. And it pulls off the branching paths gimmick pretty well, with each option a genuinely interesting choice. Is this a “good” movie? Not at all. Is it a “fun” movie? I suppose it is. But the number of journeys you’re willing to make through this particular labyrinth may be even fewer than mine.

Find Me Guilty

Sydney Lumet’s FIND ME GUILTY didn’t get a fair shake. I’m not going to argue that it’s brilliant, but it’s pretty good: it didn’t deserve its box office death. Perhaps the marketing had something to do with it. Remember all those posters with Vin Diesel dressed up as Willy Loman? At the time, I remember thinking, “How do you take a guy as charismatic as Diesel and throw all that away?

Well, the movie itself doesn’t throw Diesel’s charisma away. In fact, it relies on that charisma to get us through the true(ish) story of a charismatic New York mobster who charmed a jury into acquitting him and all of his friends in one of the biggest RICO trials to date. It works, and it does so because Diesel has the power to get an audience on his side, whether he’s playing the head of criminal enterprise, an alien convict, or a schlubby but funny gangster. I think the movie would work even better if it didn’t try to give some perspective to the proceedings by reminding us that, yes, the colorful mobsters really are bad guys and the vile prosecutors really are on the side of good. If you want to make us root for Diesel’s character, make us believe in his story, then put us in that juror’s box and convince us that he and his buddies are being unjustly persecuted. As it stands, the movie wants to have it both ways, a la “The Sopranos.” But “The Sopranos” had years to get us to know and love Paulie Walnuts. FIND ME GUILTY only has a couple of hours.

Nevertheless, FIND ME GUILTY stands as a reasonably amusing courtroom comedy, featuring a fine turn by Diesel and yet another remarkable performance from the formidable Peter Dinklage, who plays a co-defending attorney (Oh, how I’d love to have seen that Dinklage RICHARD III he did on stage a while back.). It didn’t make me laugh out loud, but it rocked along pretty well for its two hour running time. I suppose a guy could do worse.