THE HAUNTING (1999) *

The Haunting is Jan de Bont’s artistically inept, ludicrously overblown, and perpetually boring remake of the 1963 Robert Wise classic.  After the one-two punch of Speed and Twister, de Bont made Speed 2, this, and Tomb Raider back-to-back-to-back.  After that triple header of turkeys, he rightfully hasn’t sat in a director’s chair again.  Remember how bad Speed 2 was?  Well, this one is even worse!  It was so bad that even executive producer Steven Spielberg took his name off it.

Like Twister, it’s all special effects and no real human drama.  Take away the CGI (which isn’t very good to begin with) and you have a lot of boring people sitting around and doing boring things.  What’s amazing is that all the actors are genuinely fine performers, just not in this movie.  Lili Taylor seems to be doing a parody of her usual Lili Taylor schtick (there’s a reason she mostly appears in small indie dramas and not big-budget tentpole releases), Owen Wilson acts like he had amnesia and is trying to figure out how to be Owen Wilson again, and Liam Neeson smiles absentmindedly and appears aloof, almost as if he’s mentally calculating how much cash he’s raking in on that Qui-Gon Jinn action figure deal.

The biggest guffaws come from watching Catherine Zeta-Jones vamp it up.  She overacts to hysterical proportions as the horny bisexual of the group.  How dumb do you have to be to cast Zeta-Jones in a once-in-a-lifetime role of a horny bisexual and then you put her in a crappy CGI PG-13 horror remake?  Why couldn’t you have put her in a ‘90s erotic thriller playing the same character?  Her character belongs in Jade 2.  Not a remake of the goddamned Haunting. 

The house is the real star though.  It’s a marvel of Hollywood set construction and certainly looks great.  That’s the problem.  It almost looks like a parody of your typical haunted house.  It’s like the Haunted Mansion ride on steroids.  De Bont obviously didn’t get the message that bigger isn’t necessarily better.

You all know the story, right?  Neeson gets everyone to the house to study their dreams or some shit, but really, he wants to see how they’ll react to being inside a haunted house.  Generally, they act just like anyone would when confronted with ghosts and shit.  So, what’s the point?

From the stupid CGI ghost children that crawl under bedsheets to the giant swinging lion head plume that decapitates people, the set pieces range from yawn-inducing to eye-rolling.  The “feel good” ending is the fucking worst though, and the final big bad ghost is so shitty, it makes the “Darkness” monster from the House on Haunted Hill remake look like the Thing in comparison.