THE HAUNTING (1999)
Nice shirt, Owen
I'm so bad - I never did read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, despite being a member of the Grimoire reading group even then. So, obviously, I won't invoke the contents of that tome in my look at Jan de Bont's adaptation of it. I'll keep references to the 1963 Robert Wise film of the same title (and genesis) to a minimum, since honestly, I don't really remember all that much of it. I'll just look at it as it is...which is okay, not bad, but not very good.
Fourth-billed Lili Taylor gets the lead role here as Eleanor (call her Nell), an insomniac who's been recently relieved of her eleven-year duty of caring for her invalid mother (i.e. the old bat finally keeled). She's two months behind on her rent, and her own sister (Virginia Madsen - don't look for her past that first scene) is just about to haul her into court over the distribution of the estate. One day she gets a phone call drawing her attention to an ad in the paper - nine hundred bucks a week for research subjects to participate in an insomnia study. So she packs up her breadbox-like car and jaunts off to the immense Hill House where the study is to take place.
Also in the study is Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a foxy bisexual vixen (all right, three "x" words!) who keeps flirting with Nell, and Luke (Owen Wilson), a geeky college student who obviously thinks he's a lot more charming than he really is. Performing the study is Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson), who isn't telling them that the whole "insomnia" angle is just a front for a study he's doing on fear. (man, not the ol' "face your worst fear" chestnut again!)
Oh yeah, and Hill House is haunted.
Performances are a little mixed here - Neeson just kinda goes through the motions, and Wilson actually manages to be more annoying than his counterpart in Wise's film. This guy's jokes - and there are a lot of them - are ALL bad, and ALL delivered poorly, timing way off. He's supposed to be comic relief? Gimme a break. The funniest thing about this guy is his parade of hilariously ugly shirts and outfits - it looks like he's trying out for the role of Moose in a live-action Archie movie. All he needs is a big "00" on the back.
The ladies, however, fare much better. Z-J (that'd be so cool if I actually knew her and called her "Z-J" ? y'know, we'd pass each other on the street, she'd say "Hi, Brian!" and I'd say "Z-J!") has never seemed so comfortable in front of the camera, and I don't think she's ever looked better. Yowza. Taylor is the only cast member upon whom the material makes demands, and she comes through well. She's infinitely better than the sobbing hysteric in Wise's movie; there's just no comparison.
There's also Bruce Dern (two scenes, given little in either) and the piano player from Eyes Wide Shut (don't think he got any lines). It's not a big cast, and the four leads are the only ones that require even the slightest attention. But the real star of the movie is Hill House. For one thing, it's just so big! (my first thought on seeing it: "Man, what a dusting job." Definitely my father's voice - he's got a thing with dust) And it's creepy, too - lots of big bronze griffins, half-drowned bronze statues, bronze doors into which are carved Purgatory-entombed children - the decorator had some sort of a bronze thing, I guess.
It's loaded with fascinating rooms, like the big, chain-shielded walk-in fireplace, the hallway where you have to use stone books as stepping stones to get across what looks like several inches of water, and some sort of weird, spinning carousel/ballroom, complete with mirrored walls. If the names of art directors meant much at all to me, I'd list one off right now, but I have no idea who's responsible.
This being a haunted house, it's a save bet that we'll get either lots of special effects and/or sound effects. The sound effects are all really well-done - the kind of thing I'd hoped for when I first mused, upon viewing Wise's film, that if it were filmed today, they could really go places with the sound. Unfortunately, most of the noises are so unidentifiable that you can't imagine what they are, and being able to imagine something is a lot more scary than NOT being able to. The visual effects are a mixed bag - one of the things that makes CGI (at least in its present stage of development) a rather poor choice of effect style in a horror movie is that most CGI effects give themselves away before they happen. Just by looking at a shot, you can tell if something digitally manipulated is going to move. I can't explain just what it is that tips you off, but chances are, if you've seen enough CGI effects, you know what I mean. This works better in other kinds of movies, but in a horror movie? Not good.
That having been said, the effects are enjoyable, if obvious. But as a horror movie, The Haunting doesn't really deliver much. It boasts one intense, frightening scene, involving a wall whose stained-glass windows seem to stare - reminiscent of a similar scene in Wise's film, but nowhere near as intense. Other than that, attempts at horror mostly come across as "Cool! It turned into a hand!"
de Bont doesn't sound like a great choice for a horror director, but I guess for this, he's as good as any; he shows a good amount of visual patience, essential for a horror movie, far moreso than so many other action movie directors today. It's not like this is "The Haunting...from the director of Armageddon and Bad Boys", or "The Haunting...from the director of Con-Air". de Bont previously worked as a cinematographer on such films as Cujo, and Black Rain - he knows what constructing an atmospheric setting is all about. That the movie fails overall speaks more of a sort of half-assed effort on the part of him and certainly the writer, David Self, than it does of his potential. After Speed 2, he's probably afraid to take a lot of chances right now.
It's fairly enjoyable eye candy overall, but hollow everywhere else you'd care to look in it. I wouldn't recommend it, except to horror novices - for example, I pointed out to my rather squeamish sister (not the one who poured water into the TV) that if she wanted to see a scary movie, this is probably the one for her. If you're reading this review, you're probably not a novice - so do yourself a favor, rent Wise's movie, turn the lights out, ignore its own pesky characters and cower in terror from that face on the wall.
The IMDb says that Lisa Loeb was in this movie. If she was, I didn't notice.