Right off, I recommend it for its visuals. The building and its devices engage the eye and chill the spine. The early scenes depicting how the former mental institution gained its grisly reputation are...satisfyingly grisly. For the s&m inclined, some intriguing devices are put to use.
The Vincent Price-like evil character, Steven H. Price (an homage to Price's work in the 1958 version of this film) is strikingly introduced as the multi-millionaire designer of a roller-coaster guaranteed to horrify its passengers to the point of insanity. The roller-coaster sequences--and especially the fiendish imagination behind them--are brilliantly conveyed.
If only the filmmakers had sustained that early high level of imagination and horror, this could have been one of the best horror movies ever made.
But then it quickly degenerated into cliche--a half-dozen or so people tempted to spend the night in the old mental hospital by the prospect of each receiving a million dollars. And of course, they were picked off one by one, for no convincing reason.
The mayhem was very haphazard without being surprising. You never knew who--or what--was going to kill whom, but when they did, you weren't really convinced as to why they should want to do so. And so the whole plot got all flaccid and out of focus.
One of the characters was trying to break into television production by video taping the goings-on. And she caught a scene from the institution's grisly past on tape. Now that's the kind of idea that should have been developed--bring in something supernatural and drive the participants insane--or to the point where they couldn't tell if they were insane or not--where they (and we along with them) couldn't know for sure if these crazy things were really happening, or if it was all an illusion created to horrify them, as was the roller-coaster.
The filmmakers just never realized what potential they had for a cracking good horror tale.
The Vincent Price-like evil character, Steven H. Price (an homage to Price's work in the 1958 version of this film) is strikingly introduced as the multi-millionaire designer of a roller-coaster guaranteed to horrify its passengers to the point of insanity. The roller-coaster sequences--and especially the fiendish imagination behind them--are brilliantly conveyed.
If only the filmmakers had sustained that early high level of imagination and horror, this could have been one of the best horror movies ever made.
But then it quickly degenerated into cliche--a half-dozen or so people tempted to spend the night in the old mental hospital by the prospect of each receiving a million dollars. And of course, they were picked off one by one, for no convincing reason.
The mayhem was very haphazard without being surprising. You never knew who--or what--was going to kill whom, but when they did, you weren't really convinced as to why they should want to do so. And so the whole plot got all flaccid and out of focus.
One of the characters was trying to break into television production by video taping the goings-on. And she caught a scene from the institution's grisly past on tape. Now that's the kind of idea that should have been developed--bring in something supernatural and drive the participants insane--or to the point where they couldn't tell if they were insane or not--where they (and we along with them) couldn't know for sure if these crazy things were really happening, or if it was all an illusion created to horrify them, as was the roller-coaster.
The filmmakers just never realized what potential they had for a cracking good horror tale.