Five or ten minutes in, I was prepared to write that House on Haunted Hill runs circles around Jan De Bont's unspooky scare ride The Haunting. By this juncture, we've already seen two exciting sequences: the bloody revolt of badly treated patients at a Depression-era mental institution; and the introduction of theme park magnate Price (an eponymous tribute to the original's star, Vincent Price), whose sadistic rollercoaster designs could have been plucked from the imagination of Charles Addams. The proverbial downward spiral begins thereafter.

Morticia to Price's Gomez is Evelyn. He's throwing a birthday party for her at the reputedly haunted hospital, which he has jury-rigged to go bump in the night. Unprepared guests of this soirée, including some producer-types and the building's paranoid owner, have been told they will receive a cool million if they can survive 'til morning. The thrills and spills begin soon enough--none of them, we learn, Price's trickery at all.

At least De Bont's film had a set dresser. The "house" in question here, a dilapidated skyscraper, is a maze of damp, hollow corridors, almost as boring to look at as the actors are to listen to, save Rush as Price, who sounds faintly like James Woods on amphetamines. But the man won an Oscar only three years back... Are these breadjobs already necessary?

It's difficult to convey just how awful this gratuitous refashioning is without actually showing it to you in full: it's a 'matrix' of bad slasher flicks. The proceedings are frightfully uninspired--rather, they're too much inspired by Jacob's Ladder and the work of the Brothers Quay; director William Malone demonstrates all the ingenuity of a photocopier.

To hammer this point home, James Marsters, the most vital cast member of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (he plays Spike, Buffy's peroxide-blonde nemesis), appears for a couple of minutes at the start of House on Haunted Hill in a part that requires him to say nothing and have his face partially obscured by a video camera.

Boo, indeed.

A film this imperative to our cultural history deserves a top-drawer DVD transfer, and that's just what we get on this Warner issue, along with a host of extras, natch. The 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced image is near perfect; the dank cinematography sports fine shadow detail and inky blacks. Minor pixellation is evident in misty scenes, but only upon close examination. In the sound department is where this disc truly excels.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix contains plenty of unmotivated bass (as was the case for The Haunting), and surround effects that will have you looking around like a fool. (The opening riot, demo material on a par with Saving Private Ryan (and almost as violent!), really tweaks the nerves.) If dialogue is occasionally too quiet, all the better.

Bonus material, surprisingly, is of both quantity and quality. William Malone is delightful and generous on his commentary track, though he has apparently deluded himself into believing this movie, his third big-screen outing, is a) worth discussing, and b) not an honest-to-goodness full-on travesty. (Remember, Warner refused to show it to press prior to its theatrical release last fall, a move they hadn't made since The Avengers.) Malone also delights in his introductions to three deleted scenes, one of which was filmed twice due to poor exposure and then never used at all. (I watched both and prefer the one they scrapped initially--it has more energy.) Debi Mazar cameos in these scenes as, what else?, a manic bitch.

A 19-minute documentary called "Tale of Two Houses" compares and contrasts William Castle's 1958 version with its nineties counterpart to good, if not meaningful, effect. Its narrator, however, has been fed terribly ignorant copy. His assertion that Castle's mostly suggestive approach wouldn't fly with special F/X-craving modern audiences is simply untrue, as neither The Blair Witch Project nor The Sixth Sense were hampered at the box office by their lack of pyrotechnics. (The combined gross of Blair Witch and Sixth Sense: $450 million; House on Haunted Hill hauled in about a $40 million.)

Six effects featurettes, all of them informative, plus a silly montage of clips from Malone's 1985 cheapie Creature, cast and crew bios (William Castle gets one, too), theatrical trailers for both the '99 and '58 Houses, a TV spot for the redo, production notes, a pointless computer-animated nugget titled "The Chamber" (intended to simulate the sensation of being locked in one of the institution's torturous contraptions--I say the film itself gave me a good enough idea), and nifty animated menus seal the deal on this loaded SE. DVD-ROM content: an interactive game, two relatively informative and insightful essays on the history of horror (cinema), and the remake's studio-sanctioned website.-Bill Chambers