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THE HAUNTING |
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You want a snap judgement? This film sucked.
I was expecting it to be bad, but was stunned by just how awful it is.
First and foremost – it’s not the least bit scary! I saw the trailer
for The Sixth Sense before The
Haunting, and those two minutes frightened me more than this entire
film. And this is from someone who is not all that hard to frighten. Ghost
stories usually work on me, but all this one succeeded in doing was boring
me. It didn’t even make me jump. Hell, I’m a career neurotic who
drinks half-a-dozen or more cups of strong coffee a day. My nerves are
shot. Everything makes me jump – except The Haunting. The
skeleton bit might have worked, except that the framing of the shot
telegraphed exactly what was going to happen. And that’s my next
complaint: the film’s total lack of subtlety and ambiguity. There is never the slightest doubt over what’s going on in that house because nothing is left to the imagination. The effects are in our face right from the moment the characters set foot in the house. I wish someone could convince modern film-makers that CGI effects are not, in themselves, frightening. It’s all in the way they’re used, not just the fact of them. Frankly, the Id Monster from Forbidden Planet is scarier than most of what was tossed up here. Jan De Bont’s direction is relentlessly heavy-handed. Everything is laboured, everything shoved down the viewer’s throat. (As we watch De Bont’s camera panning up and down the nasty spiky things hanging over Eleanor’s bed for about the thirtieth time, I’m sitting there thinking, Is that enough, Jan? Are you quite sure that everyone in the audience can see what’s coming?) Another major problem is the house itself. It’s absurd. Never for a moment do you believe that you’re seeing a real house – everything about it screams Movie set! Movie set! And since the effects and the sets don’t work, there is nothing to distract the viewer from the screenplay, which is horrendously bad. The tampering with the original story proves disastrous. Instead of all of the participants having a reason to be in the house, the current scenario makes the presence of anyone but Eleanor irrelevant. The characters of Theo and Luke are utterly superfluous, except as house-fodder. Even Dr Marrow serves no real purpose besides kicking off the "plot", while his character is nothing more than everyone’s favourite cliché, the Unethical Scientist doing an Illegal Experiment. (One of these days I’ll see a movie with an ethical scientist doing a legal experiment, and the shock will probably kill me.) But if the screenplay is bad, the performances are worse. Liam Neeson really ought to see a doctor about his somnambulism. Catherine Zeta-Jones proves conclusively that, as an actress, she’s a great clothes-horse. Owen Wilson clearly wasn’t interested in even trying to disguise the pointlessness of his character; it was a great relief when the house finally disposed of him. (If it had done it about an hour earlier, we would have had cause for celebration. Oh, and a note to the kid sitting in front of me: you’re quite right, his nose is weird.) Lili Taylor, to her credit, does try hard, but is defeated by the inanity of her character and the embarrassing badness of the story’s denouement. The film’s plot is never for a moment credible, but by the time we reach the big showdown scene, with Eleanor confronting the spectre of her great-grandpappy and shouting, "It’s about family! It was always about family!", my Oh-Please-O-Meter had not just gone off-scale, it had blown a gasket. Seriously, after seeing this film, the muscles around my eye-sockets were sore from all the eye-rolling I’d done. The Haunting is a text-book example of what’s wrong with film these days: millions upon millions of dollars spent on effects, and hardly a thought given to the writing, the acting, or the intelligence of the audience. It’s flashy, empty, and insulting. The only purpose it serves is to highlight what a good film Robert Wise’s 1963 version is. If you get the chance, watch it, and see what can be achieved with imagination and talent in place of a big budget. Better yet, read the book. Apart from being a truly frightening story, it begins with my nomination for the best opening paragraph ever written.. |
