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Stephen receives the first of several unpleasant surprises when he greets the invitees: Eddie (Taye Diggs), an ex-baseball player Blackburn (Peter Gallagher), a soft-spoken doctor Melissa Marr (Bridgette Wilson), a former TV anchor who’s eager for another shot at stardom Sara (Ali Larter), a strong-willed beauty who claims to be a movie studio executive and Pritchett (Chris Kattan), a high-strung, hard-drinking fellow who is the last living descendant of the asylum’s original owner.Įxcept for Pritchett, Stephen doesn’t know any of these people. He agrees, but replaces her guest list with his own. Evelyn demands that her husband rent the still-standing Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane - a monolithic art deco edifice atop a spooky oceanside hill - so she can throw a birthday party there. Among the fascinated viewers: Evelyn Price (Famke Janssen), Stephen’s shamelessly decadent (and flagrantly unfaithful) trophy wife. In a clever segue, some of the grisly footage is aired more than six decades later on a true-crime TV series. Riot sequence climaxes with the mad doctor and his nurses getting a taste of their own medicine while a home-movie camera records the horror. Vannacutt (Jeffrey Combs) and his associates were especially fond of operating on patients without using an anesthetic. Remake begins on a genuinely unsettling note, as the inmates of a Depression-era insane asylum launch a bloody rebellion against the sadistic staffers who have long tormented them. Even more than the name change, Geoffrey Rush’s slyly allusive performance comes off as a wink-wink homage to the original pic’s star. In this version, the suavely sardonic host - known as Frederick Loren back when he was played by Vincent Price - is Stephen Price, the multimillionaire owner-designer of frightfully exciting amusement parks. Screenwriter Dick Beebe recycles a few key plot elements from Robb White’s 1958 scenario, but greatly expands upon the guests-in-a-haunted-house premise.