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Everyone heaped so much abuse on Jan de Bont's HAUNTING remake when it first came out that I held off seeing it... until now... that's on Netflix... streaming in glorious color, widescreen and HD. And boy am I mad. I could have been watching this film every day for years! Is it terrible? Lil bit. But it's also just what I need, what America needs, what the world needs, on a cold rainy December Monday night after work when you kind of hate life for making you so cranky and your feet hurt and the heater's spewing out weird mold smells, and the cat's harassing you for more food when you just fed her. You need to take a shower but the thought of touching a faucet handle makes you recoil as if its initial coldness will burn you skin. On and on, with no end in sight. But then... HAUNTING. Life is good again.
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Sure the CGI is super uncool, but so what? It was 1999 and the ghosts are all, uh, supposed to look like Han Solo in a deep freeze, or the POLAR EXPRESS passengers in a melting heat. They're part of the CGI-rococo conceptual design, sculptures come to life, like clay Orson Welles in HEAVENLY CREATURES (left). It's not supposed to a turgid white elephant downer... it's supposed to reverse your downward spiral through camera trickery... it's not great, and I don't want it to be. And that's why it's better than the original, because it's not trying to be. It's not even trying to be better than the original HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. It's just trying to make it to 90 minutes so it can roll credits before some new seismic shift of tone takes place.So I guess that's what I mean by "better." I can admire the 1963 HAUNTING only from behind a velvet rope but its bid for artistic credence makes it painfully dry in spots. The remake is a vibrant good-bad ghost film with a beautiful sprawling, dark-colored sets, an attractive cast in dark-colored clothes who decide (most of them) to try and play off each other in cute little bits of darkly scanned business, and then Lili Taylor clobbers a griffin with a shovel. Life can be beautiful.
In the end of course it's taste preference in cast and color schemes, here the entire look of the film seems created to bring out the dark lushness of Catherine Zeta Jones and haunting limpid pool peepers and alabaster face of Lili Taylor. As with the original however, the women are great and the men are barely adequate: Owen Wilson tries to pass his weak Reid Fleming World's Toughest Milkman-esque smile off as genuine and though Jones sees right through it, she doesn't snap his head off but treats him like her younger brother's puberty-hitting friend who keeps trying to find excuses to hang out in her room. I felt Manny Farber termites n sme of their nervous politeness and campfire bonding, the way the huge spaces of the house make them value each other as proof the scenery hasn't swallowed them rather than vice versa.
Believe it or not it's actually Liam Neeson who comes off the worst, like he's never worked with CGI before! Bitch, what about Star Wars? Oh yeah, he sleep-acted through that too. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for actors forced to pretend with all their might that a ping-pong ball-covered boom stand is a lizard mutant or whatever, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. There's a typically hilarious CGI moment near the end when Liam has a giant canopy bed mouth hovering over his back fixing to stab him with its poles and his reaction is more like a man hearing the phone ring and getting up to go answer it. I remember the moment I knew the PHANTOM MENACE was going to suck was when he has his first conversation with Jar-Jar and he's just staring blankly over at this bizarre ridiculous muppet - a Rastafarian muppet version of my old accident prone disaster of a roommate Neil - like he's standing in line at a post office. Oh Liam, is that your "I am listening" face?
No matter: the three other actors actually make the most of their scenes of interaction, especially early on in the film. Once the dismal opening scenes of greedy relatives are over and Taylor is off in the crazy Bell Jar / Hill House on Haunted Hill or whatever, she comes alive, and the house itself is a five alarm pisser. Floor to ceiling, soup to knots, the ornate architectural style is so vividly and gorgeously unified that I was totally turned on and totally creeped out at the same time. I generally hate that kind of rococo style, cherubs don't creep me out in a good way but in a suffocating grandma doily under the candy dish way, but I loved the look of this house, the black and blood is my whole color scheme and the way it beautifully compliments whatever (Jones especially) happens to be wearing.
Robert Wise, director of the original is, let's face it, a talented journeyman who can direct anything well, and occasionally he gets inspired, as in parts of WEST SIDE STORY. But he can also get so wrapped up in keeping things classy he forgets to be exciting. I love 50s sci fi and have seen Hawks' original THING a hundred times but have only seen Wise's DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL twice. Sure it's well crafted and intellectual but damn is it preachy. I'd rather ride with the wrong side that stand around arguing with the right. Unless you're a nuclear disarmament specialist, watching it is like getting yelled at for a crime you didn't commit. But oh it's iconic, Gort and all that. Yeah, what does Gort do, just stop other people from doing things. He's strictly reactive. That's kind of Wise's style (most of the time, not all the time). Like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, his HAUNTING is considered one of the definitive classics of the genre. Yeah but maybe it's not a ghost story at all and is just in Julie Harris's mind, and she's a great actress but I never much cared about what's going on in her mind. She was so miscast in EAST OF EDEN I still bear a grudge, and she seems to be a compendium of asexual old maid neuroses to the point she seldom comes alive, for me. I love Lili Taylor though and Jan de Bont gives her eyes a steady twinkle - her emotions are always so on her sleeve that we're never sure just how much of what's going on in our minds is due to her own psychic projection or ours. Not only do I want to know what's on Taylor's mind, I feel like I do - the window is wide open. Even when she's holding back she's like a cat that just swallowed a canary of a role and isn't afraid to let a few feathers fall out of her mouth... Harris would just waft in with one of the feathers in her arms, cradling it like she thinks its her child, the one who drowned as an infant in the bath and everyone said was her fault but you don't find that out until the "shocking" tea time denouement.
Winning an Oscar for her work in CHICAGO perhaps took her above consideration for tossaway matinee nonsense like THE HAUNTING, but here is Catherine Zeta at her sexy best, showing why an old reprobate Mike Douglas would drop everything he was doing to carry her away like an ADVENTURELAND Ice King. Her mind-bending hotness includes: a face born to wear make-up, great taste in color schemes to bring out that raven hair, and a habit of slinking around in her body like a luxuriant demon on a 24 hour pass. And she's a great scene player, she needs good actors to be good herself, but she's also fun riding up on mediocre ones, like when she connects with Owen Wilson, imitating his every last note with wry eye rolls, like he's a little brother type she knows just how to tease into a Renfield. With sweet and sacred Lili, though, she connects in a kind of patient slow burn lesbian faux-outing that doesn't have to go anywhere to be foxy.
And Owen Wilson is so much better than Russ Tamblyn in the original, who's such a one-note greedhead it gets on my nerves. If you listen closely you'll realize the screenwriter wanted to make sure we knew Tamblyn's rich scion is only here to check the place out as haunted or not before he sells it (he's the heir). Everything he says has to do with how much he could get for this or that as if everyone around him is all excited for him to be richer than he already is. Yo, Tamblyn! We get it, you're a whiny little Bowery Boyish pisher determined to play a character even more one-track greedy than old Walt in CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Now let it go, bro. Maybe think of something else, just once.
No there's only one reason to watch the 1963 HAUNTING and its foxy lesbian psychic Claire Bloom, especially in the sexy bed scene with Harris. But there are three reasons to see the 1999 edition: the gorgeous interior sets (the unique attempts to make the house seem alive are very Lacanian, Zizek would approve), and the two ladies. The two men are annoyingly smug in both, though Richard Johnson as the doctor isn't quite as dry and condescending as Neeson, he's also less complex. Sure sure sure, who am I to dare declare the 1963 HAUNTING overrated and as drab as a sunny afternoon wasted watching SOUND OF MUSIC in the school auditorium on the last day of class? I'm just a man who escaped that auditorium. Who went to the bathroom and never came back. And now I'm standing before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor as they run hand-in-hand through wild dark sets, and feeling the grueling slog of that escape finally melt off me, as if from a slug of laudanum with a Jaeger chaser. mmmmm--dark.
