THE HAUNTING (1999) (DreamWorks) Starring: Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson. Screenplay: David Self, based on the novel _The Haunting of Hill House_ by Shirley Jackson. Producers: Susan Arnold, Donna Roth and Colin Wilson. Director: Jan De Bont. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, profanity, violence) Running Time: 110 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It's too bad there couldn't have been a bit more distance between the release of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and the making of THE HAUNTING -- then, at least, director Jan De Bont wouldn't have had an excuse. With recent history to consider, it may have made a perverse economic sense to turn Shirley Jackson's supremely creepy story into a special effects-filled funhouse. Then along comes BLAIR WITCH to prove that you can still rattle an audience with what might be happening rather than a computer-generated representation of what is happening. Ironically, BLAIR WITCH owes a debt to the original 1963 version of THE HAUNTING in its study of the psychology of fear. Sadly, THE HAUNTING circa 1999 owes a debt to Jan (TWISTER, SPEED 2) De Bont in its study of thick-headed filmmaking.
An even more bitter irony is that this version of THE HAUNTING gathers its characters for a study of the psychology of fear. Researcher Jeffrey Marrow (Liam Neeson) brings together three subjects for an experiment, telling them only that it's a study of insomnia. His actual goal is to examine mounting fear and paranoia by placing his trio of volunteers in the creepy Hill House, a mammoth manor with a dark history. Nell (Lili Taylor), Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Luke (Owen Wilson) all soon experience strange phenomena, but it is the emotionally fragile Nell who experiences them most strongly. She comes to believe that the spirits of tormented children haunt Hill House, and that she must play a special role in quieting those spirits.
It's fairly clear from the start that the real star of THE HAUNTING is the house itself. De Bont sprinkles the film liberally with sweeping helicopter shots of the sprawling exterior; he prowls through the bending hallways and pans across cavernous great rooms; he lets cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathe the ornate bedrooms in muted oranges and reds. Eugenio Zanetti's production design is certainly eye-catching, offering more detail than one could possibly absorb in one sitting, but at a certain point the sprawling staginess of the house starts to work against the film. It begins to feel like Disney's Haunted Mansion crossed with the Winchester Mystery House, a tourist attraction designed more for spooky giggles than for genuine shivers.
Once the house fails to deliver the creepiness, you're left with the treatment of the material, which is literalist to the mundane extreme. Robert Wise's 1963 THE HAUNTING was hardly perfect -- Julie Harris' hand-wringing fussiness took her Nell too far over the edge from the start -- but it began from the principle that fear is about anticipation, not revelation. De Bont has no interest in any such subtleties. Instead of making a film about the way an environment of terror is more powerful in imagination than in reality, he makes a film about faces appearing in pillowcases, leaping skeletons, windows that turn into big staring eyeballs, and living statues a la Ray Harryhausen. Every bit of subtext is either turned into in-your-face text (Claire Bloom's ambiguously flirtatious Theo in the original becomes Catherine Zeta-Jones' "Hi, I'm a bisexual" Theo) or abandoned (a key piece of Hill House back-story about a tormented caretaker similar to Nell). With its foundation-shaking finale and monstrous apparitions, this isn't a remake of THE HAUNTING. It's a remake of POLTERGEIST.
Of course there's a place for the POLTERGEISTs of cinema. Generally, however, it helps if that sort of film can tap into something primal, like scary clowns or menacing trees. THE HAUNTING can't really be classified as a horror film, because there's nothing remotely horrifying about it, unless you count the inanely expository dialogue (e.g., a character reacting to a stairway collapsing: "Look, the stairway is collapsing!"). In fact, it's often downright laughable -- sometimes intentionally (Owen Wilson's goofball performance), sometimes not (a blissed-out otherworldly ending that makes GHOST look restrained). De Bont has made a film from The School of Quips and Money Shots, all flash and chuckle. He's merely interested in showing off his big-budget toys so everyone can see the thing that goes ooga-booga. That's a pretty limp take on a tale of the ooga-boogas inside our heads.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 ghost busters: 4.
Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews