The Haunting is like this really cool toy you've seen on TV, with all the gadgets and lights and sounds, but when you open the box and stick your hand in, it's nothing but moldy cheese and smelly poop. It's yet ANOTHER example of a big studio absolutely destroying the entire genre of modern horror. Offensively bad and actually insulting.
I'm DYING to hear from some one who would actually recommend this dreck. Although I'm sure it is quite deserving, I'm wondering why Wild, Wild West got the entire nasty buzz this summer, yet The Haunting somehow survived. It avoided the pre-release shitstorm usually reserved for such big-budget, laughably written, special effects wastelands such as this. (As movie fans, we choose to cast our votes where we see fit, and I will not help raise the box office revenue of that pile of snot one damn penny. On the same note, I had a free pass for The Haunting, so there, Dreamworks.)
This boring POOP made me so mad! OK, there's a bunch of mildly familiar actors and Liam Neeson. (I don't care WHAT the budget of this shitty movie was, Liam is slumming here.) There's about as much plot exposition in the first 3 minutes here as there was in The Lost World, which means zero. So now we're at this big creepy mansion, right? Yeah, if the Haunted Mansion at Disney World is your idea of terror. Throughout the entire movie, I was expecting Casper to come flying out and some character's hair would stand straight up and they'd scream: "A G-G-G-G-G-G-HOST!!!!" Absolutely nothing happens for the first 70 minutes or so, except for the following things:
Lili Taylor walks into large, empty room and says "Hello?" My guess is she does it about 11 times.
Catherine Zeta Jones smirks a little and proves that she is, indeed, made of balsa wood. (Albeit a very nice cut of balsa wood.)
Owen Wilson tries to mug and be comic relief. Too bad the script is about as funny and interesting as the side panel of a Puffed Wheat box.
Liam Neeson tries to walk through his scenes as quickly as possible, desperately trying to remember that he's Oskar Schindler, dammit! (I love the scene where he flips out, frothing at the mouth, and Zeta smacks him.)
Things move. That's it. That should be the title of this movie: Things Move. A statue, beds, carpets, curtains, everything except the plot moves a lot. I feel terrible saying this, because a friend of mine worked on the computer effects in this movie, but he'd also be the first one to agree that films like this are like cakes with nothing but icing, and just as nauseating.
Lili Taylor is so unbelievably BAD in this movie, you start to wonder why they didn't edit her out and replace her with one of those water coolers that occasionally go "BLORP!" I mean, how good of an actor do you have to be when all you're required to do is be upstaged by a fireplace? Her line readings are completely off, and she honestly seems more confused than anything else. But Catherine Z. Jones (who has supplanted Salma Hayak as buxom babe of the hour) is really awful. She tries to bring some kind of weird bisexual vibe to her character early on, then suddenly drops it. I guess it was when she realized that the only logical audience for this movie would more likely be staring at her chest for sustenance, and not sexiness.
See if you can make it through Liam Neeson's thrilling "collapsing staircase" scene without laughing, and I challenge anyone to not be annoyed at the end, where we're treated to a ghost straight out of a considerably scarier film: Ghost.
Jan De Bont proves once again that he couldn't direct cowflop to stink if he had final cut. A slap in the face to fans of horror movies, good movies, and logic. It is, however, a dead-on accurate portrayal of the combined talents of Jan De Bont, Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson and Catherine Zeta Jones, and I don't mean that in a good way.
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