Product: The Haunting [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 1.0
Hey! I got an idea! Let's take a great book and make it stupid!!!
One review says that this book had the misfortune of being released in the same year as The Blair Witch Project. That's a misnomer since a successful horror movie usually means more income for the rest of the horror movies in the theaters. A movie that stars Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson, Catherine Zeta Jones and Lily Taylor has no excuse for repelling audiences. No, this movie had the misfortune of Jan De Bont in the director's chair.I normally don't compare movies to books. It's a gut wrenching experience and despite common wisdom, sometimes the movie is just as good and even better than the book (The Godfather is a prime example of the latter). Even if a movie has very little respect for the source material it can still stand on it's own merits (Starship Troopers.) However, this movie has committed a crime so heinous as to warrent the direst condemnation.It shows the ghosts.That might seem like a minor point, but under the guise of "updating" the source material Jan De Bont completely ignored what made the source material so compelling in the first place. Shirley Jackson lets the tension build and build because she never intended to resolve it with some easy explanation. By the end of the book, you still don't know if the house is really haunted but it doesn't matter because her protagonist is scary enough (in her own passive aggressive spiteful way). Jan De Bont, seen in the featurette patting himself on the back for "updating the movie", turns the house into a Disneyland ride. It's like if someone took Superman and went "ok this is good but instead of flying and having powers, let's make him not fly or possess super strength and why don't we have him trying to make it as a Broadway star instead of as a superhero". Maybe Jan De Bont can direct The Catcher in the Rye with a Holden Caulfield that doesn't talk much, but is full of saccharine good wishes when he does talk.This movie had the production values, the actors and the source material. It could have been a classic like the original. Instead it was a mess. Maybe you can blame the budget. After all, with that much money the temptation to make moving eagle statues would be too much, but even with all that money they couldn't erase the taint of De Bont.Read the book. Watch the original. Or watching Kubrick's The Shining (which is truer to the Jackson book than this movie ironically)