Horror Extreme Movie Catalog - Editorial Reviews

This double feature DVD offers two crime-tinged horror classics from fantastic prints in letterboxed widescreen editions! First up, The Bat, is actually the fourth filmed version of the Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood stage chestnut! The Bat comes to DVD courtesy of the Roan Group in a widescreen version for discerning cineastes! Agnes Moorehead plays mystery novelist Cornelia Van Gorder, whose remote mansion is the scene for all sorts of diabolical goings-on. The "maguffin" is a million dollars' worth of securities, hidden away somewhere in the huge and foreboding estate. Then, legendary cinematic carnival barker William Castlea??s original (and superior) House on Haunted Hillcomes to DVD in a letterboxed widescreen edition! House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price as a haunting gent (you're surprised?) who owns a sinister mansion on a haunted hill. He offers several of his enemies $10,000 eacha?"if they agree to spend the night in the crumbling old mansion. Will they survive? Watch this exclusive digitally mastered DVD release from the Roan group and find out.

In The Bat, top-billed Vincent Price brings his silky sinister elegance to the second remake of the hoary "old dark house" stage play, but the real star of the show is Agnes Moorehead as an eccentric mystery writer who decides to pull off the million-dollar bank heist and the steel-clawed killer known only as "The Bat." Price's devious doctor is but one of a rogues gallery of suspects that include a Johnny-on-the-spot police detective, a chauffeur turned butler with a checkered past, and a housekeeper with echoes of Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers. Moorehead is a kick as the spirited author and makes the most of her expanded role, but fans of the early film productions (1926's The Bat and 1930's The Bat Whispers, both directed by Roland West) will be less forgiving of other changes, especially writer-director Crane Wilbur's decision to draw the story out over a succession of nights. Wilbur loses the tension and claustrophobia of the originals with handsome but airy photography, more appropriate to an episode of Perry Mason, and a rambling pace. Moorehead and Price bring a little spirit to the otherwise bland film, but not quite enough. William Castle's gimmick-laden comic thriller House on Haunted Hill is not so much a horror movie as a fairground fun house come to life. Vincent Price stars as a deliciously silky millionaire married to a greedy gold digger (Carol Ohmart) who refuses to divorce him. When he turns his wife's idea for a haunted-house party into a contest--$10,000 to whoever can spend the night in "the only truly haunted house in the world"--it seems he may have found an alternative to divorce. Five strangers gather to test their stamina, Price hands each of them most delightfully twisted party favors ever imagined (loaded handguns, delivered in their own tiny coffins), and the spook show begins. Blood drips from the ceiling, zombielike apparitions float through rooms, severed heads and skeletons suddenly appear, and then a guest is found hanging in the stairwell. Full of screams and shocks and things that go bump in the night, House on Haunted Hill isn't particularly scary and often makes little sense, but, like a Halloween haunted house, the gag-laden spectacle of spook-show cliches is quite entertaining and Price makes a sardonic master of ceremonies. The original theatrical presentations featured a typically outrageous Castle-engineered gimmick: Emergo, which was nothing more than a skeleton that appeared to fly out of the screen and over the audience on a guide wire. --Sean Axmaker