The Haunting (1999)

I wanna tell y'all, my dear readers, about a little town nestled among the Lincolnshire hills and fields. An old market town full to the rafters with chavs and scum, it has aptly served as the base of my mother's career as a prosecutor for the last fifteen years. With more boarded up shops than open ones and an active disdain for the young, it is the worst place I have ever had the misfortune of spending an extended period of time in. Hell, it is the hometown of none other than the Milk Snatcher Herself, and I went to the same high school that she did. There is absolutely no redeeming quality of this town, except perhaps one... Not five miles outside of this shitheap, is a miniscule green village called Harlaxton, that is home to not much more than an old manor house that now is a campus for US university students. This manor house served as location for Jan de Bont's 1998 'remake' of the classic horror tale, here titled 'The Haunting'.

It is perhaps the most spectacular place you could imagine. Open only a few days a year to the public, my sister and I were once dragged along to the Manor for a string quartet recital. Naturally, we snuck out of the recital room and began to roam the expansive halls of the house, and it was unlike anything we had ever seen. While at this concert, Mum's friends asked her if we had seen 'The Haunting' yet, and she duly obliged maybe a week later with a VHS copy. At 12, it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen, and I was far from a stranger to horror at that point.

OK guys, if you could approach this awful script with only 10%
 of your talent....and ACTION!

I watched it again the other day, having read on forums for years how terrible people thought it was. I had long wondered what I was seeing that they weren't, and I now opine that they were able to get past the relatively few visually-haunting sequences and look at all the primary factors that came together to create this really silly movie. As a film buff, I can now say that director Jan de Bont is one of the culprits. He is another I would classify with Renny Harlin, in that through big and not-so-big budget, they have proven time and time again that they can sustain a respectable movie career without ever really making good movies. They are also both in the habit of starting strong and ending flaccid.

This kid needs a sound beating

Consider de Bont's probably best known picture as director, Speed. We all know and love that movie. But can you show me anyone who doesn't think the whole tacked-on ending with the subway train was the most festering form of overkill to what had been, until that point, a good movie? Harlin often does the same - and often overestimates his genius for good measure - and Th
e Haunting is caught red-handed committing this sin. However, rather like with Harlin's cult classic Deep Blue Sea, de Bont's fate is sealed by his overall directive technique, and his shameless misuse of decent actors.

Yeeeaaahh... if I could get a room with "less to dust", so to
speak... that'd be great!

I like Lili Taylor, and would later go on to appreciate her in such roles as Paula Klaw in The Notorious Bettie Page, but when faced with both her acceptance of this role and her performance in it, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry for her. Many a good actor has faltered under shoddy direction over the years, and she is one of them. Even the likes of Liam Neeson and the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones are not enough to save this picture, and the goofy addition of Owen Wilson just takes the cake.

Nell (Taylor) has spent the last decade or so caring for her invalid mother, and struggles with insomnia because of her constant need to attend to the old woman, even now she's dead. She receives a mysterious phone call advising her to look in the paper, where she finds an advert for a paid sleep study conducted by one Dr David Marrow (Neeson). Marrow, we see meanwhile, is in fact studying fear, and is luring bad sleepers to this "Addams Family mansion" under false pretense in order to do so. What Marrow doesn't seem to have counted upon is there being some vague familial link between Nell and the builder of the house Hugh Crane, whose horrifying portrait hangs in the foyer of the manor and gradually decays.

Cool portrait bro... paint it again.

One assertion I maintain is that there are still a handful of creepy-ass sequences that shit me up, even now. However, the movie goes waaaaay overboard with the crappy late-90s CGI, turning the third act into one long and ridiculous merry-go-round. As much as they may think otherwise, characters largely neglect to do any real thinking about their situation, and they serve as mere vehicles for a rather perplexing and weak script, so by the end of it, however creeped out (or not) we may be as viewers, we still don't give a toss about any of the characters either way. The patchy backstory of Hugh Crane and what is causing the haunting is fed us throughout, but it never really adds up, and even now, I don't think I really get it all. So either I'm getting stupider, or this is just a bad script. Tough call.