Hill House, the imposing 19th-century mansion that is as much a player in The Haunting as the film's flesh-and-blood characters, is badly in need of feng shui. That would be the ancient, but now popular, Chinese art of making sure that a place is in harmony with nature and free of evil forces. The latter are in plentiful supply in Hill House, and some of them seem to have turned their attention to gumming up the movie's plot. What starts out as a fun, campy horror film filled with hip banter ("This place is like Charles Foster Kane meets the Munsters," cracks Zeta-Jones upon entering the house) degenerates about halfway through into a silly special-effects lalapalooza in which nasty spirits manifest themselves as homicidal statues or as hands that emerge from ceilings and walls in search of human prey. Get a grip, indeed.
Who has to contend with all this badness? The four innocents stuck in the house for the night. One of them (Neeson) is a scientist who has lured the other three (Zeta-Jones, Taylor and Wilson) there on the pretext of studying their insomnia. He actually intends to scare them with ghost stories and things that go bump in the night so that he can measure the effects of, as he puts it, "fear and anxiety on highly suggestible types." The house, it turns out, would like to make a few suggestions of its own, none of them sleep-inducing.
Based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (also the basis of a 1963 movie), this Haunting has a couple of genuine made-you-jump scares, but viewers will more often titter derisively than nervously. Director Jan De Bont (Twister and Speed 1 and 2) convincingly creates an atmosphere of menace, but he doesn't know what to do once he has it in place. The actors are mostly at sea after the larky opening scenes, although doleful Taylor acts throughout as though she were doing Eugene O'Neill with a supernatural twist. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Plays like Dark Shadows on a bad day
Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Allison Janney
Featured attraction
As a snarky little satire about beauty pageants, Drop Dead Gorgeous doesn't have much new to say but says it with gusto. The movie, in the guise of a documentary, follows the nasty connivings in a small, fictional Minnesota town during the local American Teen Princess pageant. Everyone knows that the fix is in for Becky Leeman (Richards), whose ex-beauty-queen mom (Alley) is running the pageant and whose businessman dad (Sam McMurray) is sponsoring it. Still, townies hope that perky, poor girl Amber Atkins (Dunst) will upset snooty, rich Becky for the crown.
The movie is too long by a third, but most of the performances are sharp, with Alley doing a gloriously malicious turn as the murderous mom. First-time director Michael Patrick Jann (MTV's The State) shows a snappy touch, ably building on a maliciously knowing screenplay by Lona Williams. An ex-producer on ABC's The Drew Carey Show, Williams was herself a first runner-up at the national Junior Miss Pageant. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Wins for talent, if not congeniality
Colin Firth, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Growing up in a musty castle in rural Scotland in the mid-'30s, the 10-year-old (Robert Norman) at the center of this minor coming-of-age movie barely notices that his beloved dad (Firth), a dilettante inventor, and mom (Mastrantonio) are drifting apart. Basically, the boy is too busy perusing Victorian sex manuals left in the attic by his grandpa to realize that his father has a crush on another woman (Irene Jacob). My Life So Far, directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire), is an elegiac mood piece, as decorative and delicate as fine lace and no less superfluous. The Scottish scenery, however, is a knockout. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: Pat period piece but easy on the eyes
Christian Campbell, John Paul Pitoc
The title, implying a sordid quickie, is meant to be a joke. A hit at this year's Sundance festival, trick is a gay romantic comedy that follows the broad conventions of traditional Hollywood movies. Boy meets boy, and so on. Out at a bar, Gabriel (Campbell), a dimpled aspiring writer of musicals, picks up a muscled dancer, Mark (Pitoc), whose face has a look of troubled sensitivity. Gabriel's problem is finding a place to get more intimate. His straight roomie already has company. As night stretches into dawn and the two remain bedless, the story becomes not about sex—there isn't any—but budding love.
The film takes place in a Manhattan that's as much a movieland concoction as the swingers' nightscape of Eyes Wide Shut. It's cheerful in a clunky, obvious way, as might be expected from a director (Jim Fall) whose theater credits include Cute Boys in Their Underpants Go to France. Tiny as bikini underwear, trick is not in the same league as the recent Get Real. (R)
Bottom Line: Not-very-wild boys' night out
Taye Diggs, Omar Epps, Richard T. Jones
Wedding day, and the groom has gone AWOL. His two best friends, duded up in yellow-vested tuxes, find him drunk at the home of an old girlfriend, then try to sober him up and get him back to the furious bride-to-be. En route, they lapse in and out of flashback memories of growing up together in the '80s, from junior high on, in Inglewood, Calif.—hence the title of this sentimental comedy. A few raunchy scenes suggest an African-American version of American Pie, but more often the film gets stalled in the unfocused glow of nostalgia.
The adult cast makes for an attractive ensemble—Diggs, who plays the groom, is one of the best-looking actors in movies today—but none of the grownups seem connected to their adolescent counterparts. And I never did figure out why Diggs (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) ran away from the altar in the first place. (R)
Bottom Line: Lost in The Wood
>Betty White
When Betty White was offered the role of a foul-mouthed farm widow in Lake Placid, a comic horror flick about a killer crocodile, she was wary. It wasn't the language: "Oh, it will curl your hair," says The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls veteran, "but none of it is to be taken seriously." Rather, the avowed animal lover was concerned creatures might be mistreated. Reassured that the croc was only as real as the computer that powered it, she signed on.
But once filming began, she almost had a cow. In one scene, bovine crocodile bait is being transported via helicopter over a lake, "and all of a sudden it turns its head and moos," she recalls. "I thought, 'They lied to me!' They laughed so hard. The cow was completely animatronic—they made its head move."
This fall, White, 77, is back on firmer footing in the CBS family sitcom Ladies Man. When she's not before the cameras, she's a vice president of L.A.'s Zoo Commission. "I spend more time on my animal work than I do on my career," says White, whose husband, Password host Allen Ludden, died in 1981. "There's not much time for relaxing."
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Julie Jordan.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
