Hill people

If you're among the bold videophiles enjoying movies in the maximum possible crispness with a Blu-Ray or HD DVD player, then you can be among the lucky minority experiencing Return to House on Haunted Hill today in its full intended glory.

While the movie hits stores in regular and both hi-def formats, only the Blu-Ray and HD versions contain "Navigational Cinema," allowing you to choose the direction of the action from numerous branching points in a reported 96 different ways, a more developed version of the Final Destination 3 pick-a-path gimmick.

Gimmickry of this sort is easily and perhaps rightly criticized, but this is the perfect place for it. Return to House on Haunted Hill loosely continues the story from 1999's House on Haunted Hill, William Malone's agreeably goofy, interestingly cast updating of the 1959 original. That flick was a hit for William Castle, and if anyone was ever more interested in creating an enjoyable, interactive experience for the audience than in adhering to usual rules of narrative, it was Castle, and I think he'd be pleased to check out choose-your-adventure cinema, if he weren't too busy shaking his head sorrowfully at $1000 Blu-Ray pixel-clarity home-theater setups to pay any attention.

After seeing Malone's horrible followup Fear Dot Com, I began to wonder if maybe Malone wasn't saved on House by a cast (Geoffrey Rush as a character named Price, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Jeffrey Combs as a mad doc) who were in on the idea of House in a way Malone wasn't.

Return to House on Haunted Hill doesn't boast the same pedigree, and while Malone is absent (Víctor García makes his feature debut, with three more horror flicks in the works), I'm not convinced Amanda Righetti, Erik Palladino, and Cerina Vincent can bring a sense of fun to Return. At least Jeffrey Combs is back.