Review of Haunting, The (DTS)

Introduction

Jan De Bont`s career as a director has so far centred on action movies, with Speed, Twister and Speed 2: Cruise Control. As a cinematographer he worked on Lethal Weapon 3, The Hunt for Red October and Die Hard amongst others. The Haunting then is a marked departure from his usual fare.

Starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, Lili Taylor and briefly Bruce Dern, the movie tells the story of three insomniacs invited to Hill House to participate in an experiment about insomnia. However, Dr. David Marrow (Neeson) is really undertaking an experiment in fear – but he doesn’t know about the house’s horrific past…

Video

Video comes in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and is of exceptional quality throughout the film. As you would expect with a major film made in 1999, the picture is free of grain and dirt, is very clear and has plenty of colour and contrast.

Visually, the film is stunning, Hill House (actually in Grantham, England) is creepy enough from the outside, but the fantastic interiors make the house even more alarming. Effects wise, there are plenty of computer generated ghosts etc, all of which look good.

Audio

The DTS soundtrack on The Haunting is superb and provides a demonstration of the range and power that DTS provides over Dolby Digital.

There are many reference quality scenes in the movie, and all of them share tremendously powerful, deep and clear bass which will alarm you as your room vibrates. Of particular note is the scene where Theo and Nell are trapped in their bedrooms as the demon tries all the doors. Elsewhere in the film, excellent use is made of all the channels, with plenty of effects swirling around the room and over your head etc.

Being a “horror” film, the sound effects are also designed to give you the creeps but aside from a couple of sudden noises that make you jump, there’s nothing that alarmed me.

Features

There is a behind the scenes featurette, two trailers, cast/crew bios and production notes on the disc.

The featurette runs for nearly 30 minutes and is presented by Catherine Zeta Jones and features interviews with members of the cast. Despite featuring rather a lot of footage from the film the featurette is reasonably interesting. The trailers both feature Dolby Digital 5.1 sound which is a change from the usual stereo and both sound good.

The menus are animated and look very good – starting off from outside the house, you fly into the main entrance hall and select your options from there.

The movie is packaged in an Amaray case and the leaflet inside includes Production Notes along with the chapter breaks.

Conclusion

In reality, the Haunting is best used as an audio-visual demonstration disc – the DTS soundtrack is quite superb and puts Dolby Digital to shame. The film is drivel – neither scary nor creepy but just tedious nonsense over reliant on admittedly good special effects and set design. The characters and plot are unbelievable and uninteresting – or in the case of Owen Wilson’s character Luke, just irritating – particularly as every time he grins, his teeth are clenched...grrr!

The picture and sound are superb and the extras average, but these unfortunately don’t make up for a general lack of entertainment in the main feature.