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Reviews
The Haunting (1999)
Too much well lighted detail, not enough suspense.
A misguided researcher tricks a group of insomniacs into taking part in an live-in experiment to be conducted in a haunted castle built by a nineteenth century tycoon.
If there is a fatal error that a director with a strong background in cinematography can make when doing a gothic horror flick, it's to use elaborate scenes and light them so that the screen is always full of ornate detail. Highlighting just the spooky visual elements would have created a better sense of creepiness. The Pit and The Pendulum or some original black and white Frankenstein films are works in which one can find what isn't in this movie: a good dose of visual Poeism.
The old castle is intriguing but too orderly and well kept to evoke the sense of impending doom that this movie desperately needs. A few well placed cobwebs and some appropriate moldiness might help but It doesn't happen in this film, nor do the elements of tension and suspense develop.
Instead Jan de Bont puts all his money on effects and a weak script with a formulatic and flawed plot (in the beginning of the action characters are introduced only to unexplainedly disappear from the rest of the story.)
The only thing new in this movie might be some special effects techniques, but the days of relying on effects to satisfy an audience are numbered. Producers had better get back to thinking about stories and scripts.
Southern Cross (1999)
A poorly written, poorly directed formula film.
Southern Cross, written and directed by James Becket is a waste of good celluloid and actor's efforts. A formula film is not necessarily bad if it pays off on it's promise, which this film does not. It is a tiresome concoction of movie cliches that can be traced to a thousand different films from the past. It is full of random and empty plot twists that add nothing but aimless action, such as a trip by the protagonists to a ghost town where the villains (unexplainedly) follow them. This was obviously concocted as an excuse for a shoot out and escape scene bordering on the preposterous, with people popping in and out of doorways and running past windows while firing pistols at each other. It makes one believe that somebody told Becket there was a ghost town in the Chilean foothills and he said, "Oh great, lets do a shoot out scene there."
Don't even waste your rental money on this. It is a bunch of random bits and pieces from a hundred different films thrown together to call an action drama.