The Haunting Review
By Joe Lozito
The Same Old Haunts
"The Haunting", Jan De Bont's new special effects showcase, answers the burning question, "can Hollywood still make a scary movie?" The answer: well...let's just say I was frightened, but not scared.
I was frightened by how little Mr. De Bont seems to understand the horror genre. He gets it right for a while. The setup of the film is fine, though particularly by the numbers. The characters are introduced one-by-one in typical Irwin Allen fashion as they arrive at the house to participate in an ill-defined psychology experiment. And, in fact, the house is absolutely beautiful, if completely unbelievable. Soon enough, things start to go bump in the night (very loudly) and at one point there is a genuine scare as a skeleton, for an instant, seems to have a life of its own. That's when all hell breaks loose. Literally.
Putting Jan De Bont at the helm of a horror film is like assigning John Sayles to direct "Armageddon 2". Horror requires some degree of subtlety. Where in Mr. De Bont's past ("Twister", "Speed", "Speed 2") has he been known to leave anything up to the imagination? The reason the skeleton from early in the film is scary is because there is no reason for it to happen. But once we've seen one statue of a child's face move, why would five be scary? By the same token, why is it scary to see the evil spirit of the house floating in the hallway for an entire scene? Mr. De Bont manages to exhaust his considerable arsenal of special effects, leaving him to turn the volume up to compensate.
The movie is carried by the talents of Liam Neeson, Lily Taylor and, to some extent, a wasted Catherine Zeta-Jones (providing window dressing in a house that has enough on its own). For a film so populated with ghouls and disembodied voices, "The Haunting" is remarkably soulless.
