House on Haunted Hill/The Last Man On Earth
by Ubaldo Ragona, Sidney Salkow, William Castle
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DVD details
Actor: Emma Danieli, Franca Bettoia, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Umberto Raho, Vincent PriceDirector: Sidney Salkow, Ubaldo Ragona, William Castle
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: Color, Full Screen, Letterboxed, NTSC
Picture Format: Letterbox
Running Time: 161 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-10-03
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Tgg Direct
DVD Reviews of House on Haunted Hill/The Last Man On Earth
DVD Review: My personal favorite horror film of all time
Summary: 5 Stars
While "The Last Man on Earth" is a fine Vincent Price vampire film, I wish to focus particularly on this 1959, black-and-white version of "House on Haunted Hill".
First, this is the version that you want, especially if you have a widescreen television. Many other DVD releases have been "panned and scanned" to facilitate the full-screen aspect, (which cuts off the left and right sides of the film and renders a blurrier negative). Others are listed as "widescreen". In my opinion, the letterbox format is superior to these other alternatives.
As I mentioned in the heading, this is my personal favorite of all horror films. Vincent Price is just at his pinnacle in this one! The filmscore here is superb, a 60s atmospheric and wandering composition by Von Dexter. And, by the way, skip the mediocre color remake version of this film (1999).
The story here is that Vincent Price plays a playboy millionaire who, along with his unfaithful wife, invites a number of people to stay overnight in a haunted, but modern, mansion where a number of people who previously stayed were murdered. If these "players" survive the night, they get $10,000 each. Each of the guests has been personally selected from varying rungs of the social ladder but they all have one thing in common: they're all hard-up for cash! You won't guess the end of this one.
Directed by the great William Castle, the sets and location of the film are pure treasure, especially the "acid well" in the basement! The cinematography is superb and the casting, including the neurotic Elisha Cook, Jr. as the house owner, is perfect. The man and wife servants are pretty darn shocking too.
This print is the best you can obtain. It's crystal clear and I highly recommend it.
DVD Review: scary stuff
Summary: 4 Stars
I think this old House on Haunted Hill is scarier than the new one. Classic Vincent Price. Spooky effects are kind of lame (hey it's an old movie) Totally worth buying it. Classic movie to watch on HalloweenDVD Review: paid under five bucks
Summary: 2 Stars
They just don't hold up all that well. Last Man... is better than the other, although that's not saying much.
Also, you can see where George Romero borrowed heavily for his Night of the Living Dead flicks.
I must add: Richard Matheson is a highly respected genre writer. Besides writing LAST MAN ON EARTH (among other books and screenplays) He's the guy who wrote the excellent DUEL,
starring Dennis Weaver. Get it, if you've never seen it.
I really don't blame him or the late Vincent Price for the way LAST MAN... turned out. It's really not a bad flick...and yet you can't help feeling that it should have turned out far better, that the material was there...
Hey, if you're about ten years old...you might get a real kick out of it.
DVD Review: Two must-see Vincent Price classics
Summary: 5 Stars
It doesn't get much better than this twin-bill of Vincent Price classics. I consider The House on Haunted Hill to be one of the best haunted house movies ever made. The effects may seem somewhat silly to modern audiences, but the simplest frights are often the most effective. The plot itself is gratifyingly complex and twisted, and the ending is by no means disappointing. Anyone with an interest in the horror genre should find this Vincent Price gem to be quite a hoot. Then there's The Last Man on Earth, which is one of the best horror movies ever made, period.
As a jaded modern horror fan, I can't say The House on Haunted Hill really scared me, but I daresay that if you put a couple of hundred people inside a modern movie theatre and showed this film to them, you would get some delightful screams and jumps out of your audience. A movie such as this belongs in black and white, and the whole mood is appropriately creepy. The director left almost nothing out: creaking doors, apparitions, secret rooms, screams (almost so many they become annoying), skeletons, thunder and lightning, organ music, moments of total darkness, a pit of acid, and - of course - Vincent Price.
Mr. Loren (Price) is an eccentric man of wealth throwing a haunted house party for his fourth wife (who is as anxious to kill him as he is to kill her). He promises to pay $10,000 to anyone who can make it through the night. Five strangers make up the party guests - a former test pilot, a society newspaper columnist, a psychiatrist, an unassuming, vulnerable young lady, and the house's owner, who keeps going on and on about the murders that took place there. Naturally, weird things start to happen, and then all of the party goers find themselves locked in the house prematurely with no hope of escape until morning. Naturally, rather than stay together, the houseguests end up wandering around on their own, and the impressionable young lady is especially traumatized throughout the evening by what she sees and experiences. There are games afoot, the full extent of which are not revealed until the ending of the film. In its original theatrical release, the ever so fiendish director William Castle had a skeleton rigged inside each theater that would appear above the audience's heads at the appropriate time - I would love to have experienced that.
The Last Man on Earth is based on Richard Matheson's incredible novel I Am Legend, in my opinion the second best vampire novel ever written. Price plays Morgan, a man left completely alone in the world by a plague that wiped out the rest of the population, including his wife and young daughter, three years earlier. The virus behind the plague was a vampiric bacillus, so all of the people who died and were not destroyed by fire have come back as vampires. Luckily for Morgan, the vampires are quite weak and simple-minded, for they attack his fortified home every night in an effort to get in and kill him. By day, Morgan goes out hunting the walking nightmares and driving stakes through their hearts, but there are so many that the project seems almost useless. Midway through the movie, we are treated to a pretty extended set of flashbacks to the early days of the virus and the deaths of Morgan's wife and daughter. Toward the end, Morgan is shocked to find a woman wandering outside during the day, the first human being he has seen in three years. He takes her home with him and thus sets the stage for the movie's memorable climax.
Obviously, Vincent Price carries this movie on his own back, given the fact that the vast majority of the action takes place around him and no one else. He plays things rather subtly for the most part, which I found quite effective. His memories make him laugh sometimes, but Price's signature laugh evolves quite effectively into sobs of anger and frustration. The most poignant moments of the film, in my opinion, come when Morgan finds a dog outside his house, the first living creature he has seen in three years. The dog initially runs away from him in fear, but the suffering creature eventually comes back. Morgan cleans him and fixes up his wounds, but the new friendship he exults over soon becomes just another tragedy. The movie doesn't dwell on the dog episode nearly so much as Matheson does in his novel, and for this I am grateful because I find it heartbreaking. The little dog gives an incredible performance, but as is so often the case the canine actor does not even merit a mention in the credits.
The Last Man on Earth really is a remarkably good movie and really showcases the immense acting abilities of Vincent Price. I wish it would have delved into the science of the virus much more intensely than it did; the scientific aspects of Matheson's story are what make it such a phenomenally good vampire novel. The script writers did take some liberties with the concluding scenes, but it is really for the best because the novel's conclusion would not have worked in this medium without the audience being given a much more penetrating look into the minds and motives of the characters involved. Some might find the movie creepy, but there is really nothing here that will disturb the timid viewer-the camera never actually shows any of the gruesome acts that tend to be committed by human beings against vampires and vice versa. Somber and depressing as it can be, The Last Man on Earth is the type of distinguished horror movie that should appeal in some way to just about everyone.
DVD Review: A nice surprise
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this for the movie that I remembered, House on Haunted Hill, which on watching again is a pretty cheezy piece of work. The other movie, Last Man on Earth, I had never heard of, and recognised only from the intro on the DVD which told me in so many words that it was based on I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I found I really liked this movie. In a sense, it's like many other 50's and 60's movies in that the bad guy(s) lose. That's the only resemblance, however. In the first part we see Vincent Price as the relentless vampire slayer. Others have commented that these don't seem like "real" vampires, but who knows what they would really be like anyway. We've seen too many Dracula remakes where the vampires are quick, agile, mean and clever. Who is to say they can't be slow, stupid, weak and evil? Anyway. In the second part, we are given the story of the beginning of the plague, which resmebles The Stand, only about 99.99999999% fatal. One survivor, to be exact. As the third part progresses, we start to see new possible candidates for the good guys (behaving just like we do in the old Dracula movies). Finally we see Price for what he has become, a legendary creature of terror, in a total reversal from the vampire as the shadowy creature in all the other stories. You have to see it. This is a great piece of work for all it's faults.
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