Bambi 2! (The Haunting (DVD))

Member Name: GR-Design

Product:	The Haunting (DVD)
Date:	05/11/02 (357 review reads)
Rating:

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It was Halloween so I thought I would rent a creepy film to watch, so I went and got ?The Haunting?. I hadn?t actually looked on websites before hiring this as I usually do, I just went for it, and my theory about checking up on movies before renting them held itself up proud as sadly, ?The Haunting? which is a horror failed to be scary and failed to be creepy. Instead it tried to entertain me with a quite weird plot!

The Haunting was surprisingly directed by Jan De Bont, the man behind Speed and Twister. Speed was a good film, Twister was ok, and he has just gone downhill with The Haunting. What surprised me the most though was the budget, $80m and they came up with a mediocre film. Ok, the special effects are quite good, but where?s the scary stuff?! It took $91m in the US and £5.6m over here in the UK. However, having watched the trailer on the DVD, it does give the film a kind of ?I need to see this? feel to the film. If I had saw the trailer in the cinema I would have wanted to see the film.

It scored a mighty (cough) 4.7 on the IMDb website a pretty poor score to say the least especially when you see that the twister got 5.9. It?s quite entertaining and I watched it all the way through, but it would never make my personal DVD collection!

It all starts off with the viewer witnessing a women getting told she has to leave her own house. You can tell this woman, Eleanor (Lili Taylor) doesn?t have much self esteem, all she wants it to keep her house, she owns nothing else and seems a bit dim if you ask me. She gets a phone call offering her $450 a week to help out with some research, only those with bad sleeping patterns or insomnia are invited, so she decides to give it a go and gets some directions to the place where the study is taking place.

She arrives at Hill House, a huge huge mansion type place with would make you feel really scared just driving up to it. She?s kind of greeted by an old man, the caretaker of the place wh
o takes the chains off the gate to let her in. She is then taken to her room by the women who runs the household. Her room is huge, with statues and carvings everywhere, mostly of children?s heads, she soon falls in love, and soon gets told by the housekeeper than no one will be around after dark, no one will be able to hear them, after dark. You know that something is going on.

We soon meet the other people who are participating in the study, being Theodora (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Luke (Owen Wilson). They are just as happy to be there, Theodora being a bit of a know it all and up herself and Luke just being like he is in any other film apart from Behind Enemy Lines where he actually gives a very good performance!

After all the meetings etc we learn a little more about the house, about who built the house etc etc and then the hauntings start, the weird things start going on, but only one of the group can see it to start with, the rest are oblivious. Then it all starts happening and we see everyone starting to go mad, but they don?t seem to get scared, or maybe the acting let that bit down!

Ok, it sounds quite good on paper, or on monitor should I say, but really it isn?t. It?s probably the plot that lets it down, or is it the acting, or maybe the lack of scary moments, or maybe the special effects. Oh I don?t know, maybe it would just everything that let the film down.

The special effects are actually very good and I was quite impressed, that?s probably what most of the $80m of a budget went on, but just because the special effects were good, it didn?t make this a good film. The ghosts were just to obvious, they were right in front of your eyes, there wasn?t really any suspense build up and nothing was believable.

Acting was what you?d expect too, it was ok, but it seemed to me like they just wanted to get the film finished. What would you do if you had just been pulled underwater by a huge statue with blood pouring
out of its mouth, would you just get up and carry on like not much had happened or would you get the hell out of there screaming and whaling like a scared kid?! I know what I would do. There were just no emotions in the acting, the characters never seemed scared or confused by what was going on around them. It seemed like they weren?t really surprised or shocked by the stuff they had just seen and that a babies silhouette in a pillow calling your name was natural and you?d just talk back. No, it just doesn?t work that way!

The film is more than a scary film, its about purgatory, which I don?t understand much about anyway, but this only becomes apparent towards the end of the film. I thought I was in for a scare fest, or to at least be a little nervous at what was around the corner, but this was a sad excuse for a horror, in fact, the last film that really got to me was the Blair Witch Project, and I?ve watched a fair few films since then, what?s happening to horror films these days, where?s the frights?

It?s a 12 certificate, so not much sign or blood and gore and I should have taken note of the 12 rating when renting it as it would have told me this wasn?t that scary, Gremlins is scarier.

Not recommended.

If your looking for a film of this type, try House on the Haunted Hill, it?s a better film but made in the same sort of way with the same kind of plot.

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