Rating: 

The Info

Directed by: Jan de Bont
Written by: David Self
Starring: Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lili Taylor, Owen Wilson
Produced by: Susan Arnold, Donna Roth, Colin Wilson

The Nutshell

A psychologist tricks three people into staying in an old mansion as part of a study on fear. When the house turns out to be haunted, things turn ugly.

The Review

    In the late 1990s, special effects technology has brought near-unlimitness possibilities to filmmakers. Anything a director wants to put in his film can be achieved. Take as an example the awesome Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, with its amazing Pod Race, or The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves seems to move faster than a bullet. Perhaps the most fitting example is the original Star Wars trilogy. George Lucas was able to add scenes to films over a decade old thanks to the technology at his fingertips. It was perhaps inevitable that with the greater possibilities these effects offered, many other aspects of film, such as story and character development, would suffer. The Haunting is the perfect example of special effects ruining a movie.

    A remake of the 1963 spooker of the same name, The Haunting follows its predecessor's story fairly closely. Dr. Marrow (Neeson) wants to conduct an experiment in fear, but tells his subjects that it is  study of insomnia. He finds an old mansion, Hill House, and invites his three guinea pigs over for a slumber party of sorts. The three subjects are Eleanor Lance (Taylor), Theodora (Zeta-Jones) and Luke Sannerson (Wilson). They arrive at the mansion and are shown to their rooms by the housekeeper Mrs. Dudley (Marian Seldes) who warns that she will not stay after dark. Eleanor feels an attachment to the house, and weird things start happening. The temperature in rooms drops suddenly, loud banging interrupts everyone's sleep, and Dr. Marrow starts to suspect that the house he chose to scare his subjects might actually be haunted.

    The 1963 Haunting used one single special effect: a door that bulged inwards. The rest of the film was a series of events that could have been the result of a haunting, someone's joke (one character's name was written on the hallway wall in paint), or all in the head of Eleanor (Julie Harris). This gave the film a creepy feel, and the film's ending left us wondering whether Eleanor was insane, or truly communicating with the old house. As mentioned above, Jan de Bont's Haunting is an example of special effects killing a movie. de Bont took the older Haunting and added an abundance of cutting-edge effects, similar to recent ones used in The Mummy. Faces and spirits show up in walls, bedsheets and curtains, statues come to life and entire rooms change shape. The problem is none of it is scary. In fact, it is boring compared to the house itself. On an interesting side-note, Jan de Bont is quoted in the National Post as saying about the special effects "It's not like huge, silly monsters. It's very subtle." I'd like to know what Mr. de Bont thinks is subtle about an entire room changing shape while a 20-foot wide face comes down from the ceiling and arms reach out of its mouth to try to grab someone.

    The film's one saving grace is the mansion itself. Formerly owned by Hugh Crane, a man who used children as slave labour and whose spirit may still reside inside Hill House's walls, the mansion is an architect's fantasy. Take the largest of Great Britain's Royal Households, and fill it with gothic hallways and statues, secret passageways, and an impressive air of menace and you've got Hill House. No room is plain, with production designer Eugenio Zanetti obviously having had fun building the set. The house's gloom, combined with a quiet rumble of sound that is heard anytime a door is opened, make this haunted house a classic. The set is so creepy that apparently the stars were scared to be on the set alone (though this could be simple propaganda to get us to see the film).

    As with many remakes of today, everything from the original is made obvious. The original Theodora (Claire Bloom) was a woman whose sexual preferences weren't obvious... though she gave hints of being attracted to Eleanor. Zeta-Jones' Theodora mentions "my boyfriend... and my girlfriend" in her first 3 minutes onscreen. Eleanor is no longer just a woman whose past gives her an empathy to the house's evil past, but is now a distant relative of Hugh Crane and thus is given a more direct connection. This is similar to the misguided remake of Psycho, where every single subtle nuance of Hitchcock's masterpiece was dumbed down for today's audiences by Gus Van Sant.

    The script is atrocious, full of stock lines like "get away from there!", "run!", and "it will never let us leave". Dr. Marrow's two assistants who arrive at the house with him wind up quickly leaving the house. They are asked to call Marrow when they are okay, yet they are never mentioned again. Several scenes don't gel, with Eleanor standing beside her car, and then somehow driving it through a gate one second later. The film's climax is preposterous and feels like something writer David Self had to settle on due to the lack of a suitable replacement. The acting is average, with Zeta-Jones reminding us her lack of acting ability, Taylor putting on a straight face for laughably bad lines, and Neeson reminding us that he is deserving of better work. I heard  the person next to me say to his wife "Wow, that movie was a special kind of bad!" I think he summed it up perfectly. The only people who will love this movie are those who rent Showgirls or Deep Rising repeatedly, for the so-bad-it's-funny fun. During the supposed-to-be scary last 20 minutes, you could hear laughter coming from all around in the theatre. Skip this movie.

Copyright - Tim Chandler

Press "back" to return to your previous page, or click on a link:

Adventures in Cinema front page - Max'd On Movies - The O.F.C.S.