A lot of horror movies use stingers at the beginning to foreshadow something or exposit some lore to the audience that it’s difficult or just plain clunky to include in the main story itself. Usually, though, this is an inciting incident that sets the main story in motion (Cry_Wolf) or an event that has a secret, significant connection to the characters (a la Urban Legend).
The Haunting of Molly Hartley has just such a sequence, but it has nothing to tether it to the main plot of the film. There is no callback to it, save an acknowledgment that Molly is not the only character that this is happening to, something immediately undermined by having another other character that this is happening to right there in the A plot of the film.
But that’s not the most maddening thing about The Haunting of Molly Hartley. That would have to be that…wait for it, there is no haunting. We think that she’s hearing things, hallucinating, and that these odd nosebleeds that she’s getting are all symptoms of some supernatural force, but they’re actually happening because Molly has a small, benign brain tumor that is successfully removed before the halfway point of the film. She continues to have vivid daydreams about her mother murdering her, but that’s because her mother is in a mental institution for trying to murder her in the recent past, and because, in his infinite wisdom, Molly’s father has uprooted her and moved her to the same town where her mother is institutionalized. Great job, Father of the Year.
It’s only when her mother is released from her asylum by a sympathetic nurse and, predictably, tries to murder her daughter again, that we learn the truth: Molly was stillborn and her parents made a deal with the devil to bring her back to life, the price of said bargain being that Molly would belong to the devil when she turned 18. For the rest of the movie, Molly wrestles with this knowledge, is nearly drowned by a fundamentalist classmate who thinks Molly is evil, and is confronted with the revelation that the only way to keep herself from becoming evil is to murder her father (an evil act) in a plot twist that is either poorly thought-out, ironic or both. Proving less dumb than the writers, Molly tries to off herself, but it’s past midnight on her birthday, so she’s unable to do so, since she’s eeeeevil and all, now. Then she has her father institutionalized and graduates high school. The End.
What?
That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Skeleton Man. I’ve seen Flu Bird Horror. This is a movie that sticks to its premise (a haunting) for maybe thirty minutes, a third of its running time, part of which is concerned with a completely different and unconnected girl who is, again not the titular hauntee. And the haunting is not really a haunting. This is like calling a movie Gunfire Mayhem and having one big action scene at the beginning and then the rest of the movie being like a tea party or something and that giant action set piece was actually just a dream. It’s like going to a Merchant Ivory film and only seeing terse, loaded conversations and wistful, lovelorn sighs for mere moments before exploding in a frenzy of blood and murder (which, come to think of it, is compelling – just picture The Remains Of The Day like that; think about it).
The only good thing about this movie is that I didn’t pay to see it, except in the most psychic of senses.
