Product: The Haunting [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 1.0
The Surprise Comedy Hit of the Season!
"The Haunting" offers a textbook example of what happens when too much money is thrown at an ill-conceived project in the hopes that it will bear fruit. To terrify an audience, a good director needs no more than the ability to recognize and manipulate the power of the human imagination; the original "Haunting" or "The Blair Witch Project" come to mind. Jan de Bont, the director of this film, seems to have set out to make an aggressively mediocre movie: nothing, but NOTHING, is left to the imagination here. Every single supposed "fright" in the film is served up naked under a spotlight for us, leaving us with nothing but a collection of bland computer renderings. It was as if the advent of computer technology permitted the filmmakers to reveal all that was so cunningly suggested in the original with no thought as to the consequences. All psychological terror is expunged by the lack of faith in the intelligence of the audience. On the lighter side, the audience with whom I saw "The Haunting" had a grand time -- we recognized this contempt the filmmakers had for us and laughed from beginning to end. I never thought a decapitation by a huge stone lion's head flue could be funny...but films can always surprise you, can't they?