The Haunting (1999 Remake): Dreamworks SKG/ Roth-Arnold Productions Rating: USA: PG-13/ UK: 12/ Australia: M
Anyone who has been reading my reviews here at Epinions with any regularity knows that I always strive for depth. I’m never content to simply tell you a film "rulz" or "blowz", instead I try to point out its strengths and weakness in a more articulate fashion. Here, however, I find myself at a bit of a loss—there’s no better, more succinct, way to sum up Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake of The Haunting than this: it sucks.
That such a turgid, tepid, banal script ever got green-lighted makes me wonder just what’s going on over at the Dreamworks’ offices. I’ve seen some schlock in my days, but nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever been more insipidly stupid than this big budget piece of cinematic tripe. Here’s a shining example, a beacon in the night, proving once and for all that Hollywood has no idea whatsoever as to what constitutes a horror film. The Haunting is the Hollywood equivalent of cotton candy—pretty to look at, but ultimately unfulfilling and guaranteed to make you sick to your stomach by the time you’ve finished.
The movie tells the story of three strangers who come together to take part in an insomnia study run by Dr. Jeffrey Marrow (Liam Neeson: Star Wars Episode One, Schindler’s List). The subjects are about as varied as you can get—there’s Eleanor (Lili Taylor: High Fidelity, Pecker), a mousy woman who lets everyone around her run all over her (as witnessed through the film’s opening scene), there’s Theo (Catherin Zeta-Jones: Entrapment, The Mask of Zorro) the bisexual vixen, and there’s Luke (Owen Wilson: Anaconda, Armageddon) a devil-may-care weirdo. These three disparate individuals end up at Hill House—a massive gothic mansion situated in the isolated countryside. Hill House has a past, one dealing with child murders and more—a past which Marrow relates to the guinea pigs on their first night in the house. You see, Marrow isn’t really interested in insomnia—no, he’s really doing a study on fear, and the story and the gothic setting are all part of his research…only it’s all more real than he ever realized.
The fact that it’s based very loosely on Shirley Jackson’s classic novella The Haunting of Hill House and Robert Wise’s fantastic 1963 horror film The Haunting, gives Jan de Bont’s (Speed, Twister) film quite an interesting lineage—and one that it never comes close to living up to.
The first problem is the script. Screenwriter David Self has chosen to use the novella and earlier film as a starting point for his film, but he quickly sets out for new, and uninteresting, territory. The story itself is ok—the idea of the house being haunted by the ghosts of dead children has a very creepy air to it—but the characters are so bland and uninteresting that we never come to care about their safety. Hill House has a very menacing presence, and truthfully, it’s a bigger star than any of the Hollywood talent. Factor in that the film has some of the most inane dialogue ever penned (including a terrible scene near the climax where the characters are trying to batter down the locked gate and escape and Lili Taylor decides its time to have a lengthy discussion about the circumstances under which she was chosen to be in the study) and you can start to see why this film is so awful.
But wait—there’s more. The script is never frightening as Self and de Bont have decided that loud booming noises and CGI FX work are all you need to terrify modern day audiences. We’re treated to one FX shot after another (and truthfully, none of them are all that impressive) in the hopes that the audience won’t notice how thin the story here really is. Needless to say, the plan doesn’t work.
Even more annoying is the film’s goofy climax. It’s predictable and extremely expository—revealing information that anyone with half an ounce of common sense figured out somewhere back in the film’s second reel. The metamorphosis of Taylor is unbelievable, as we’re expected to believe that this character has suddenly, in the space of an evening, developed the ability to stand up for herself. Add in the extremely cheesy dialogue and you’re guaranteed to be howling with laughter during the film’s most important scene.
Of course, David Self doesn’t deserve all the blame—the acting is awful too. Neeson shows he’ll do just about anything for a paycheck (has he been in some real garbage since Schindler’s List, or what?) Zeta-Jones demonstrates that all she has going for her are her looks as she prances around trying to be sexy (Save your money Catherine—or better yet, marry Michael Douglas…he can support you once your looks have faded and you’re not getting anymore work). Taylor is just awful—words can’t even begin to describe the absolute lameness of her portrayal of Eleanor. And Owen Wilson—well, he’s basically a very poor man’s Matthew McConaughey.
As mentioned above, the film relies on an abundance of CGI effects, but none of them can make the film even remotely interesting or frightening. I find it amazing that Stanley Kubrick could make a film about a haunted hotel (The Shining) 20 years ago, without tons of special FX, and it’s still 100 times more frightening than this film.
Jan de Bont’s direction is nothing to write home about either, although he does demonstrate that he still has an eye for visual composition in his scenes (he was a long time cinematographer). Nice visuals aside, the film clunks along at such a dreadful pace that you’ll find yourself wondering if it’s four hours long.
On the plus side, the film features one of the most incredible sets I’ve ever seen. Hill House’s interiors were designed by Gino Zanetti (Restoration, What Dreams May Come) and they’re absolutely gorgeous. The sets are lush and elaborate affairs looking like something out of a Dario Argento flick (I wish someone would give Dario a set like this and a budget—he’d make a film that would destroy this garbage). The real tragedy is that nothing else on the screen is ever as interesting as the sets—in fact, I’d have rather had de Bont run his camera around the empty stage for an hour and a half…it would have been far more interesting than this film.
Rest assured, The Haunting is an awful film—one that demonstrates the Hollywood fixation with style over substance. It’s not a good horror film, it’s not a good haunted house film, in fact, it’s just not a good film period. I can’t imagine that anyone out there found this film scary—but if anyone did, I’d like to take them and do a little "clockwork orange" on them by tying them up in my living room, prying their eyes open, and forcing them to watch hour after hour of real horror films instead of this fluff. The Haunting has no redeeming qualities whatsoever—it’s not art, and it’s certainly not entertainment. View at your own risk—you’ve been warned.
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