On the return of Dr. Vannacutt
In Return to House on Haunted Hill, the sequel to 1999’s hit horror remake House on Haunted Hill, a new group of people willingly enter the Vannacutt Institute unmindful of the supernatural terrors that await and in search of an idol that may be the source of the building’s evil. Encoring as the bespectacled, adroit Dr. Vannacutt is Jeffrey Combs who tells us he received an opportunity to catch the film well ahead of its October 16th DVD bow.
“It’s a whole new cast in this but it holds together nice, it looks great,” he tells ShockTillYouDrop.com. “[Director Victor Garcia] really maintained the visual language, it has good pace. This is a formula you see fifty million times – a bunch of people get in a house and you wonder how they’re going to die. There are pitfalls with that, but it doesn’t come across that way in the film.”
The disc’s much talked about “navigational branching,” which allows HD DVD viewers to guide the film’s plot, was news to Combs when he first enlisted for the sequel. “Honestly, when I got there, that part hadn’t been articulated. I read the script, but even the script I read didn’t go into [the branching] too much,” he explains. As director Garcia would tell Shock at the San Diego Comic-Con, the script’s “branching” revisions arrived shortly before principal photography. “That was fine, though, it’s clever and a good hook for a movie of this genre. The new generation of horror fans is going to love it.”
Combs adds that the Vannacutt character benefits with a little growth from this new technique in home cinema. “He’s still a bit of an enigma, but I was surprised to find that there was one scene where I have dialogue, because Vannacutt doesn’t talk. In the regular version of the film, that’s the case, I’m silent, but in the branching versions I talk a little bit. There’s one branching bit where they step back in time and find me in my office and the nurse calls me in and I do an operation – you get to see that in detail.”
More on Return to House on Haunted Hill soon…
Source: Ryan Rotten
