Return to House on Haunted Hill

A sequel to the 1999 movie with Geoffrey Rush and Chris Kattan, which I enjoy more than any reasonable person probably should. The connection is that one of the two survivors of that film, Ali Larter's character, dies early in this film, and her sister gets dragged into the mess. There's some ancient Satanic idol suspected to be within the place, and there's an archaeology professor and one of his former students turned into a relic-hunting merc after it.

I think the people who made this one worried that too many of the victims in the earlier film were too likeable. So you've got the relic hunter and his team of gun-toting goons, and one of the professor's Ph.D. students was sleeping with him to funnel information to the relic hunter. The sister (who runs a magazine that's probably a lot like Maxim) and one of her photographers (who was just trying to be helpful) are caught in the middle.

There's not a lot of open conflict between the sides, because one side usually has enough guns to just order the other around. So the film quickly dives in to everyone splitting up and getting steadily picked off during what's basically a fetch-it quest. Find Object A, return to Point B, reveal Exit C. 

It's a bit more gruesome about the deaths than its predecessor, more shock value and Raimiesque gore. One guy gets drawn and quartered by angry ghosts. Another gets thrown in a furnace by terrible CGI charred corpses and burned to ash. Another has a fridge dropped on their head. Instead of amorphous shadows, or only being able to see the ghosts through camera monitors and not with the naked eye, the ghosts are perfectly visible whenever they feel like it. Most of them have oddly elongated faces or features that are stretched out. The idol is in the depths of the hospital, in an area that is somehow almost organic. Like that part of the building is flesh-and-blood now. Why? No idea.

It's weird, because occasionally the movie will do something relatively subtle. The sister tries to slip away while everyone is arguing, and the one female merc, blurry in the background of the shot, ducks behind a column and follows her until she eventually cuts her off. The movie doesn't see the need to draw attention to it, which is the first and last time I can say that.