The Haunting
No one's asking for this review, as everyone knows how bad it is,
but I'll just say it's just as bad as you heard it was. Worse, in
fact.
I called up my video guy. (They deliver here in NYC.) "Gimme
The Haunting," I sez.
"No, you don't want that," the guy sez. He really did
sez this. He doesn't even know me.
"No," I sez, "I really do want it. I know it's bad.
I love really bad movies. I watched the Avengers four times."
"You don't want this," he sez.
But, you know, I'm the customer, so he sends it over.
A few points:
-- There are two kinds of horror movies: Movies with physical
horror and movies with suspense/psychological "horror"
(well, unease or disquiet more than horror). Ghost movies are
doomed to be the latter unless you introduce physical avatars in
the film, like mouldering zombies. If you don't introduce such
physical avatars, your film is doomed to be a suspense movie, not
a horror movie, which is fine, if you have the craft to pull it
off, and you don't mind boring a lot of people.
The Haunting attempts to become a physical horror film in the
last half, by making the entire house turn into a CGI monster.
Everything moves. Every fucking thing. It's stupid. It's not
scary. It's obviously CGI. Hilarious shot: Two windows turning (via
computer generated imaging) into big red mean eyes. Fucking
children's "horror" books used to have pictures like
that, and they weren't scary when you were five. They're just
absurd. A house cannot eat you, nor can it cut your throat.
It is therefore intrinsically not-scary.
Might as well make a car or an eighteen-wheeler
your "monster." Oh wait, they did that, in Christine
and Maximum Overdrive, and those movies were laughable too.
-- Lili Taylor is ugly. She played an ugly character whom I
despised the moment I met her. I did not like looking at this
ugly broad.
-- Some blonde loser-guy was in the movie, who was also ugly,
with a fucked up nose. I couldn't take my eyes off his broken,
fucked-up nose.
-- Catherine Zeta Jones is beautiful, ridiculously beautiful.
Either you go "realistic" in casting or you go
glamorous. You don't cast Lili Taylor and a guy with a fucked-up
nose andCatherine Zeta Jones. It just doesn't fucking work.
It's like having a werewolf in Jaws. They don't mix.
-- Most Ghost movies break down, because how do you "kill"
a ghost? Such movies always end up with ludicrous means of
killing the ghost, such as friends joining hands and reciting a
childhood poem (It) or just showering the spirit with love
or some bullshit like that.
The Haunting suffers from this problem as well. How do you kill
the Haunting Ghost? Well, you give it a speech about family and
how you're not afraid of it, and then you lure towards goofy
looking doors upon which a bas-relief of purgatory is cut. And
then Demons animate from the bas-relief, for some inexplicable
reason, and grab the ghost, and pull him into hell.
And then the spirits of the children frolic with Angels and
everybody's happy. Except the ghost, I guess.
Incidentally, the guy with the Fucked-Up Nose in the Haunting
was in the Cable Guy, as the boorish dick who dated Matthew
Brodderick's girlfriend and got beaten up in the bathroom by Jim
Carrey.
The guy's face says "Dick with Fucked Up Nose." If he's
not playing a Dick with a Fucked Up Nose, it just doesn't work.
In the Haunting, he was playing a Douchebag, not a dick,
so his performance was totally unconvincing, and his Fucked-Up
Nose went to waste.
SUCKED. ASS.
TOXICALLY BAD. DO NOT RENT.
Zero out of five.
