DIRECTOR
Jan
de Bont
SCREENWRITER
David
Self
based
on the novel
The Haunting of Hill House by
Shirley
Jackson
PRODUCERS
Susan Arnold
Donna Arkoff Roth
Colin Wilson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Karl Walter Lindenlaub
MUSIC
Jerry Goldsmith
EDITOR
Michael Kahn
CAST
Lili Taylor (Eleanor)
Liam Neeson (Dr. David Marrow)
Catherine Zeta-Jones (Theo)
Owen Wilson (Luke)
Bruce Dern (Mr. Dudley)
Marian Seldes (Mrs. Dudley)
Todd Field (Todd)
Virginia Madsen (Jane)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 112m
U.S. release: July 23, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Jan
De Bont films
reviewed on this website:
- Speed
- Speed
2: Cruise Control
- Twister
|
Some
of my brothers and sisters in the movie-reviewer community were
perhaps a bit hasty when they crowned Wild
Wild West the summer's worst film. Obviously they had
not yet seen The Haunting, a needless remake of a solid
(if a bit stiff) chiller from 1963. Both films are derived from
an acknowledged classic of horror fiction -- Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House -- yet the new film deviates
so sharply, and so stupidly, from Jackson's simple and elegant
story that the end credit mentioning her book is the final insult
to her memory.
The premise is butchered right from the start. Liam Neeson, playing
a psychologist rechristened "Dr. Peter Marrow," lures
three insomniacs to the ornate old Hill House for alleged "sleep
research." In fact, he's conducting an experiment in fear
on his unsuspecting subjects. In the book and 1963 film, the
doctor is actually a ghostbuster who brought three people to
live in the reportedly haunted Hill House with him, to see if
anything would happen; there was no hidden agenda, and everyone
knew pretty much what they might be in for. (Part of the wit
of Jackson's story was that none of the visitors took the Hill
House legend all that seriously, until supernatural events proved
otherwise.) In the remake, the good doctor seems to pick Hill
House because it's remote and spooky-looking -- and thus a good
laboratory in which to mess with his insomniacs' suggestible
minds -- but apparently has no idea that it really is
haunted. One wonders, then, what Dr. Marrow had hoped to do to
provoke fear in his subjects. Rattle some chains? Put on a sheet
and go "Boo"?
The subjects are Eleanor (Lili Taylor), a quietly frazzled young
woman who took care of her ailing mother for years and now can't
function in the real world; Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a bisexual
fashion plate who swoops around Hill House in new boots from
Prada; and Luke (Owen Wilson), whose character was the inheritor
of Hill House in earlier incarnations of this story but now has
little reason to be there except to wander the halls nervously.
Then again, nobody else in the movie has much reason to be there,
either. They all seem stupid for falling for the sleep-research
cover story, anyway -- Dr. Marrow doesn't even bother to bring
computers with which to pretend to monitor their sleep patterns.
(What do they think he's going to do -- stand over their beds
watching them toss and turn?) Marrow also brings two assistants,
new to this remake, who exist only so that the movie can have
an expendable character who gets supernaturally wounded; the
assistants are gone almost as soon as they arrive.
The best treatment of this material is still Shirley Jackson's
dreamy, precise prose, told almost entirely from Eleanor's fraying
viewpoint. (Put Sylvia Plath in the spooky halls of the Overlook
and you'll have an idea.) Robert Wise's 1963 version was slightly
starchy but still admirable in its refusal to show anything,
its faith in the idea that a movie that leaves terror to your
imagination is far scarier than anything a Hollywood special-effects
team can cook up. Jan De Bont, the former cinematographer turned
director who showed promise just a few years ago (Speed,
Twister),
has chosen the polar opposite approach, drowning The Haunting
in rivers of cheesy-looking computer-generated phantoms. The
spirits of dead children writhe and curl behind bedsheets and
curtains, looking like Casper the friendly ghost. They also look
very much like CG effects. $80 million didn't even buy a convincing
Hill House, whose exterior shots all look like models, and whose
interiors also, whaddaya know, look very much like CG effects.
The house is so vast, so aggressively set-designed, that it's
never credible as an actual house occupying actual space.
De Bont's lowest-common-denominator method is nothing compared
to that of the new screenwriter, David Self, who feels compelled
to give Hill House a banal backstory about a vicious tyrant who
built it using child laborers. Self compounds this error by linking
Eleanor to the tyrant, invalidating the idea of the real
haunting -- Eleanor's guilt over her dead mother -- and rendering
the movie pointless. We get many laughable scenes of bug-eyed
cherub sculptures coming to life, and evil spirits roaring towards
the camera. There is also, near the end, the most unintentionally
hilarious shot I've seen since the idiotic Grandma waded through
an acidic lake going "Ooh, ahh" in Dante's
Peak. Hint: When something lethal happens in the big
fireplace, watch for Liam Neeson's reaction shot. Everyone else
is screaming in shock, and he's just standing there like "Boy,
that's gotta hurt."
When you're not yawning at the digital ghosts, you're watching
a cast of fine actors dogpaddling in clichés and terrible
dialogue; Lili Taylor, in particular, works overtime to make
her nonsensical character credible, but even this great young
actress has her limits, and if you saw her for the first time
here you'd assume she was pretty bad. And since Jan De Bont fills
the soundtrack with thundering bass noises meant to terrify us,
we can't even enjoy the movie as a retro, cheeseball haunted-house
flick -- the tone is too heavy. The difference between the minimalist
scares of the 1963 film (well-timed thumps in the night that
didn't assault us in Dolby Surround Sound) and the new remake,
with its theme-park demons that produce mostly snickers, is further
testament to how far Hollywood has fallen. Anyone with enough
money can employ state-of-the-art visual and sound effects; it
takes genuine artistry not to need them. The much-buzzed-about
Blair
Witch Project, soon to get a wide release, probably comes
closer to the spirit of the original Haunting than this
overproduced, overblown remake. |
