Director: Jan De Bont
Screenplay: David Self
Director of Photography: Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Production Design: Eugenio Zanetti
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Nell: Lily Taylor ("The Imposters")
Dr David Marrow: Liam Neeson
Theo: Catherine Zeta-Jones
Luke Sanderson: Owen Wilson
Mr Dudley: Bruce Dern
Mrs Dudley: Marian Seldes |
In "The Haunting" Jan de Bont (who brought us "Speed" and "Twister") has turned his hand to gothic horror.
"The Haunting" centres round a dark foreboding house, whose interior is described by one of the characters as "Charles Foster Kane meets The Munsters" - a description you'll appreciate when you see this gothic monster on the big screen - and it is a BIG screen.
Dr David Marrow (Liam Neeson) is a driven psychological researcher who is determined to carry out his research into fear under the guise of a project into sleep deprivation. He successfully lures three sleep-deprived people to Hill House in order to conduct his experiment, but all does not go as he plans.
Eleanor or Nell as she prefers to be called is naive, inexperienced and unworldly. She has just been released from a lifetime of service by the death of her domineering mother. She is joined at Hill House by Theo - Catherine Zeta-Jones playing a sexually predatory clothes-horse, and Luke (Owen Wilson) a frenetic and obnoxious young man. But from the beginning it is the house that takes over as the central character.
The screen is large, the house suitable fantastic - the production designer has had a field day - the special effects - well we expect them to be good these days - and the music by Jerry Goldsmith is appropriately eerie. However the characters, apart from the house and Nell played by Lily Taylor, whom I loved in "The Imposters", are less than interesting. They are simply too one-dimensional and I didn't care what if anything happened to them.
Let's face it, Robert Wise did the whole thing much better in 1963. It's sad that Hollywood can't seem to find its own, new ideas.
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