The Haunting (1999)

Some houses are born bad. Some films are, too. Bloated on their FX budgets, with no time for things like plot or character development, the late 1990s truly were a dark and perilous time for sci-fi and fantasy film enthusiasts, as one cinematic turd after another was flushed down the theatrical toilet.

Jan de Bont's The Haunting (1999) may just be the apex example of this, scoring a 15th round TKO over The Wild Wild West (1999) after surviving the brutal elimination rounds of poo-flinging with Godzilla (1998) and The Lost World (1997).

The recurring modus operandi appears to be a hope that audiences would be so enthralled by the sturm und drang of the special-effects that everything else could be glossed over, but this universally backfired on all of them. They made a shit-ton of money, sure, but imagine what kind of money would've been made if they were actually any good? Noodle that on the Tree of Woe for a spell, Fellow Programs. 

Watching The Haunting again for the first time since the theater, the FX are impressive, ground-breaking even, and the set and production designs were to die for, but the story all of that was plugged into is just so freakin' stupid, and executed with such a ham-fisted fury, one actually feels kinda bad about making fun of it, and sorry for the actors involved, because the film never stood a chance.

From the opening scene, de Bont blows his own foot off as everything Eleanor (Taylor) is faced with and does is so overwrought and overdrawn, the audience is already laughing instead of feeling sympathetic -- and worse yet, maybe even rooting against her.

And don't even get me started on the leaden dialogue. (In the night. In the dark. Mostly.) The whole film feels over-cooked, actually, with the end result of everything that was supposed to be spooky and frightening only brings titters of derisive laughter.

One can only imagine what the original cut looked like before producer Steven Spielberg saw it, panicked, and made everyone go back and 'fix it.'

It also doesn't help that the production borrowed liberally from another haunted house tale, mixing Richard Matheson's Hell House with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House; both great tales that do not mix as well as you'd think. (And is it me, or does Hugh Crain kinda look like the faux Sasquatch from Shriek of the Mutilated?)

And so, as a follow up to Robert Wise's original 1963 version, and the novel itself, the film really wets the bed with its blatant attempt to spin things around to give us a 'happy ending.'

Look, there's fun to be had and a lot to mock just for the sheer ostentatiousness of the thing. Owen Wilson continues his string of ignominious deaths in big budget horror films, and I don't mind staring at Catherine Zeta-Jones for an hour and a half, either. And her one line always stuck with me: "It's like Charles Foster Kane meets The Munsters." Hammer, meet nail. Nail? Hammer.

And then Jerry Goldsmith ends the whole thing, rather aptly, with circus music over the closing credits, which can either be read as an apology or a sad excuse for what just transpired. 

So, there ya go. Enter this particular Hill House at your own risk.

Originally posted on October 14, 2013, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Haunting (1999) Roth-Arnold Productions :: Dreamworks Pictures / EP: Steven Spielberg, Jan de Bont, Samuel Z. Arkoff / P: Susan Arnold, Donna Roth, Colin Wilson / AP: Marty P. Ewing / D: Jan de Bont / W: David Self, Shirley Jackson (novel) / C: Karl Walter Lindenlaub / E: Michael Kahn / M: Jerry Goldsmith / S: Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, Virginia Madsen