Hell House, Hill House, What the...?

I recently discovered a movie called The Haunting of Hell House (1999). The title alone was enough to get my attention. Was it related to the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House, which was based on the Richard Matheson novel Hell House? Or was it a derivation of The Haunting of Hill House, a novel by Shirley Jackson, which was adapted as The Haunting in 1963 and 1999?

The answer is no. It turns out The Haunting of Hell House was based on a short story by Henry James called the "The Ghostly Rental." James, of course, wrote one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw, which was adapted as a feature film in 1961 as The Innocents, and which has been produced for television numerous times and even adapted as an opera by Benjamin Britten. "The Ghostly Rental" is about an old man who kills his daughter and must rent her ghost the family home for the rest of his life. The Haunting of Hell House stars Michael York as the old man, but makes the main character a college student haunted by his girlfriend, who dies following a botched abortion the college student paid for.

So why is this ghostly rental property called "Hell House" in the movie's title? I don't remember anyone using that term in the movie itself, so my guess it that it's just another attempt to confuse us about Hill Houses, Hell Houses and Haunted Hills.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1959. It's about a group of paranormal enthusiasts brought together to investigate the haunted house of the title. As I said, it spawned The Haunting, one of my favorite movies about ghosts, made in 1963. (I would have guessed that William Castle's similarly titled The House on Haunted Hill  was a rip-off of Jackson's novel, since it also includes a group of people spending the night in a haunted house, but Castle's film was apparently released just months before Jackson's book hit the stands, so I guess it's just a weird coincidence that further confuses the titling.)

Matheson's book Hell House was published in 1971 and has a similar story about a group of people brought together to investigate the world's most haunted place. The Legend of Hell House was brought to the screen in 1973.

Everything got real confusing in 1999 when remakes of The Haunting and The House on Haunted Hill were released. Even the filmmakers themselves got confused as this blogger points out that the director of the 1999 version of The Haunting must have pulled as much inspiration from Matheson's book as he did from Jackson's: http://www.braineater.com/haunting99.html . And within this swirling milieu of haunted hills and hill houses comes The Haunting of Hell House, released the same year. Sadly, none of the more recent movies are close to having the same eerie atmosphere or ghostly production values as their older counterparts.

To lay it out for you, with four fries representing the best a movie gets:

The Haunting (1963) - 4 fries (Possibly THE masterpiece of the haunted horror movie subgenre.)
The Innocents (1961) - 3.5 fries (No Hills or Hells, but worth mentioning anyway.)
The House on Haunted Hill (1959) - 3 fries (A little corny but still fun - featured on Home Fry-ed Movies)
The Legend of Hell House (1973) - 2.5 fries (The movie starts well, but gets laborious as it goes on.)
The House on Haunted Hill (1999) - 2 fries (The house is the real star of this movie. It's hard to trust any film that features both Geoffrey Rush AND Chris Kattan.)
The Haunting (1999) - 2 fries (Special effects are no replacement for good ol' fashioned creepiness.)
The Haunting of Hell House (1999) - 1.5 fries (Besides not being at all what I expected, it just wasn't that interesting.)

Saving Mr. Disney

Tom Hanks as Walt Disney

Emma Thompson seems to be getting all the attention for her performance as P. L. Travers, the persnickety author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr. Banks, about Walt Disney's decades-long attempt to adapt her book to the screen. Thompson has already been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance and will probably get an Oscar nod, and rightly so. Pretty much anything she does is Oscar-worthy. However, I was excited to see the movie mostly because of the idea of Tom Hanks portraying Walt Disney. The casting seemed so natural. Hanks is almost the same age Disney was in 1961 and looks a little like the filmmaker. But it's more than that. Both men have a level of intelligence and whimsy that transcends their immense popularity.

Hanks has received no nominations for his performance as Walt Disney and probably won't. He gave a bravura performance as the title character in Captain Phillips, and that movie will generate most of the accolades he will receive for 2013. However, I love watching Tom Hanks bring Walt Disney to life. If you're a fan of Disney movies and Disney theme parks, like me, Walt is bigger than life. Seeing him as a real man, troubled by a difficult woman who unlike everyone else around him won't give in to his overwhelming desire to have his way, provides a clearer image of the master storyteller.

I'm also glad to see the very brief scene where Travers (excuse me, Mrs. Travers) catches him putting out a cigarette. Hanks fought to keep the scene in the picture. The Disney company has a general ban on showing smoking in its pictures, so instead we see Walt stubbing out an apparently unlit cigarette. It made me wince when I saw it, knowing that Disney died from complications associated with lung cancer. Walt himself avoided letting the public, especially children, see him smoking so it seems appropriate that the scene would only briefly allude to it, but it adds another level of verisimilitude to the portrayal. 

Hanks' Disney feels authentic to me. Apparently, others agree. During a panel discussion about the movie at a Disney fan club meeting, former imagineers that worked with Walt said that the movie touched them with its portrayal of their boss. I think it will touch you, too. (3 fries)

Twist Endings and/or Bad Writing

I recently watched a movie called The Ward (2010), directed by John Carpenter of Halloween fame. The story focuses on a young woman who is committed to a psych ward after she burns down a house. The ward is populated by a bunch of young women, most of whom seem unlikely candidates for commitment to a mental institution, even in 1966. The ward is haunted by the "ghost" of a former inmate who seems determined to murder the rest of the young women. Not a bad idea for a film, but as I watched I kept thinking that the plot was stretching my usually pliable suspension of disbelief out of proportion. Thankfully, I made it to the end of the movie where I found out that [[SPOILER ALERT]] the whole thing was a psychotic episode. The main character suffered from dissociative identity disorder (what they used to call multiple personality) and that the other young women (including the ghostly figure haunting the place) were just other personalities she had created to deal with a traumatic experience. While this gimmick saved the movie from being a complete waste of time, I can only give it 2 out of 4 Fries. Even with this revelation, the movie still felt overly contrived and underwhelming.

I've found myself on at least two other occasions thinking that a movie was badly written, only to have that opinion overturned with the revelation of a twist ending. One was The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan's masterpiece (perhaps his only one) from 1999. As I watched this movie, I remember thinking that I could not believe that the wife presented to us in the first few minutes of this film would have such a total rejection of her husband Malcolm (Bruce Willis) after he experienced such a tragic attack by one of his former patients. I was ready to write off the whole thing as bad writing [[SPOILER ALERTS continue]] until the ring rolled across the floor and we all realized that Malcolm is a ghost and his wife is ignoring him because she can't see him. I then went back through the whole film and realized that everything I saw as a plot hole made perfect sense within that context. I think that's good writing. (4 out of 4 Fries)

I had the same experience a few years later watching the movie Identity (2003). A bunch of strangers end up stranded at a motel in the desert while an insane killer takes them out one by one. The characters are poorly sketched and two-dimensional, and I found myself again thinking, "What bad writing!" Then we discover [[Final SPOILER ALERT]] that as in The Ward, the characters are constructs of a dissociative mind. The whole story is taking place in the mind of the criminal as a way of dealing with his mental instability. While I did not find The Ward to be satisfying, Identity was quite pleasing, after the revelation. (3 out of 4 Fries)

I guess the moral of the story is that if you're watching a movie, and you think, "Boy, this is a poorly written screenplay," give it some time. Maybe a twist ending will save it in the end. Of course, there's always a chance you may have wasted a whole two hours of your life, rather than just 45 minutes.