Film review: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Jami spotted this on a list of black and white horror movies, almost all the others of which we'd already seen, so...  Is it good?  Well, sort of.  Imagine Agatha Christie crossed with Scooby-Doo and you should get the basic idea.  Vincent Price is good, as always, and it's got the squirty little guy from Maltese Falcon (Elisha Cook Jr.) as an alcoholic who believes all the stories about the house and keeps uttering doom-laden comments like "They'll come for us, they won't stop" which makes you wonder why he is among the seven who accepted an offer of $10,000 from eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Price) to stay the night in a strange-looking (in fact designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and near where we used to live in LA) house. They arrive in hearses commissioned by Loren - three men, the little lush who owned the house and knows its disturbing history (seven people murdered in nasty ways), a psychiatrist (whom Loren's voice-over tells us betrays his greed "about his mouth and eyes") and a jet pilot, and two women (the young Nora Manning, who is part of Loren's company but has never met him, and who receives the bulk of the scares, and the gossip columnist/gambler, who keeps getting blood dripped on her from above.  Loren is there to see them arrive and watches quietly from a landing to see Nora almost killed by a falling chandelier.  He then strolls off to a bedroom where his glamorous and much-younger (4th) wife is waiting.  They banter about how this is a party and that it's for her, but very quickly it emerges that not only can they not stand each other but that he thinks she's already tried to poison him.  She refuses to join the party, so he goes down to meet the guests.  The little guy shows them the house, including the room with the ceiling blood-patch (a little girl), the knife in the draw (that was used to cut up two family members, whose heads were never found) and, best of all, the giant tank of lethal acid under a hatch in the floor of the basement.  (Apparently this was used for wine-making, but as the guy demonstrates with a rat, if you throw in something with "flesh and hair," all that floats to the top is a skeleton.)  Almost immediately Nora and the Pilot have problems in the basement after the others have gone back upstairs.  He goes into a dark closet and gets knocked out, she sees (in one of the scariest scenes in the film) what she is sure is the ghost of an old woman.  Turns out both of those things were caused by the old caretaker couple (in true Scooby-Doo fashion) who are supposed to hang around until midnight before locking the party in for the night, but scarper early, thus not allowing the already-spooked Nora to forego her shot at her ten grand.  To spice things up, Loren then passes out "party favors" - little coffins that reveal pistols on opening.  Everyone takes one, even the little guy who insists they won't save the 7 humans from the 7 ghosts, except for Loren's wife, who has been "encouraged" to join the party.  Loren replaces her gun in the coffin and closes it.  This is significant.
And so the night begins in earnest.  Someone hangs themself/is hanged - or are they?  Someone is shot - or is he?  Two people end up in the vat of acid.  Ghosts appear at windows.  Hands reach round doorways and grab shoulders.  Double-crossers are double-crossed.  There's a malevolent, talking skeleton (cue Emergo!) But five people survive the night, much to the apparent disappointment of the perpetually gloomy little alcoholic.  Should this have been on a list of great black and white horror films?  Not really - it's a diverting little number, and the best film directed by famous schlockmeister William Castle, but I don't think it would scare anyone older than about 11.  But Vincent Price never disappoints.