Rococo Gold: THE HAUNTING remake is better than the original - yeah, I said it.

Everyone heaped so much abuse on Jan de Bont's HAUNTING remake when it first came out that I held off seeing it... until now... that's on Netflix... streaming in glorious color, widescreen and HD. And boy am I mad. I could have been watching this film every day for years! Is it terrible? Naturally. But it's a terrible America needs on a cold rainy December Monday night after work when your feet hurt, the heater's spewing out weird mold smells, and the cat's harassing you for more food when you just fed her. You need to take a shower but the thought of touching a faucet handle makes you recoil as if its initial coldness will burn you skin. On and on, with no end in sight. The apartment is filthy. Why bother cleaning when it will just be filthy hours later? But then... HAUNTING... the remake.

Sure the CGI is super uncool, but it was 1999 and the ghosts are all, uh, supposed to look like Han Solo in a deep freeze (or POLAR EXPRESS through a torrid zone detour). For me the tacky ghosts are just part of the CGI-rococo conceptual design, sculptures come to life, like clay Orson Welles in HEAVENLY CREATURES (left), not supposed to be a turgid white elephant downer like the original. It's not great, and that's why it's better than the original because it has no ambition or need to justify itself --it's just trying to make it to 90 minutes, in peace.

So I guess that's what I mean by "better." I can admire the 1963 HAUNTING only from behind a velvet rope, while the remake invites you in to walk around like SLEEP NO MORE through the beautiful sprawling, dark-colored sets, to get close up on the attractive dark-colored clothes horse cast who decide (most of them) to try and play off each other in cute little bits of dark little business. And during the prolonged climax Lili Taylor clobbers a CGI statue-come-to-life griffin with a shovel. The decision is made. This is way better than the original because it's so gleefully worse.

In the end of course it's taste preference: if you need artsy justification for pouring money and talent into a ghost story then you've already lost me; if the entire dark look of the film seems created to bring out the dusky lushness of Catherine Zeta Jones then you have me, presuming I'm too beat to resist. Winning an Oscar for her work in CHICAGO perhaps took her above further consideration for tossaway matinee nonsense but Zeta was made for just such nonsense, slinking around in her body like a luxuriant demon on a 24 hour pass who was expecting to rent some tired old lady at the Hertz Possession Center and is instead given this luxury body at the same price, and showing why an old reprobate like Mike Douglas would drop everything he was doing to carry her away like an ADVENTURE TIME Ice King. She's a great one for interacting with good actors but she's also fun riding up on mediocre ones, like when she connects with Owen Wilson, imitating his every last syllable with wry eye rolls. With sweet and sacred Lili, though, she connects in a kind of patient slow burn lesbian flirtation that doesn't have to go anywhere to be foxy.

As with the original however, the men are barely adequate: Russ Tamblyn was such a one-note greedhead in the original he really sunk that film for me: everything he says has to do with how much he could get for this or that item, as if everyone around him is all excited for him to be richer than he already is. Yo, Tamblyn! We get it, you're a whiny little Bowery Boyish pisher determined to play a character even more one-track greedy than old Walt in CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Now let it go, bro. Maybe think of something else, just once. Wilson's character avoids all that, and seems mainly trying to fit in, and maybe hook up with Zeta. Well, who wouldn't? Jones sees right through Wilson's schtick but she doesn't snap his head off, treating him instead like her younger brother's puberty-hitting friend who keeps trying to find excuses to hang out in her room. I felt Manny Farber termites in some of the group's nervous politeness and campfire bonding, the way the huge spaces of the house make them value each other as proof the scenery hasn't chewed them rather than vice versa.

Believe it or not it's actually Liam Neeson who comes off the worst, like he's never worked with CGI before! Bitch, what about STAR WARS? Oh yeah, he sleep-acted through that too. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for actors forced to pretend with all their might that a ping-pong ball-covered boom stand is a living bed canopy, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. There's a typically hilarious CGI moment near the end when Liam has the bed mouth hovering over his back, fixing to stab him with its poles, and his reaction is more like a man hearing the phone ring and getting up to go answer it than someone trying to not get crushed and devoured.

Then there's the decor: floor to ceiling, soup to knots, the ornate architectural style is so vividly and gorgeously unified that I was totally turned on and totally creeped out at the same time: cherubs don't creep me out in a good way but in a suffocating grandma doily under the candy dish way, usually, but not here, babe. The house is so packed with great detail it's like the art directors thought they had a year to live and so were determined to cram in the entirety of the rest of their life's artistic contributions to cinema backdrops into one ornate maze of sets.

Then there's the direction, a comparison of which illuminates the difference between ponderously 'good' and terrible fun. Robert Wise, director of the original is a talented journeyman who occasionally he gets inspired, as in parts of WEST SIDE STORY, but time and again mistakes boring for importance. I love 50s sci fi and have seen Hawks' original THING a hundred times but have only seen Wise's preachy DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL once or twice. Who wants to be reminded how lame humans are?  Unless you're a nuclear war proponent, or have shot at unarmed aliens in the past, watching it is like getting yelled at for a crime you didn't commit. But oh it's iconic, Gort and all that. Yeah, what does Gort do? He just stops other people from doing things. He's strictly reactive. That's kind of Wise's style. Like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, his HAUNTING is considered one of the definitive classics of the genre. Yeah but...

The thing with Wise's version is that maybe it's not a ghost story at all and is just in Julie Harris's mind, and she's a great actress but I never much cared about what's going on in her mind.  She seems to be a compendium of asexual old maid neuroses to the point she seldom comes alive, for me, and there's no earthly reason James Dean would ever fall in love with her in EAST OF EDEN. I love Lili Taylor though and Jan de Bont gives her eyes a steady twinkle - her emotions are always so on her sleeve that we're never sure just how much of what's going on in our minds is due to her own psychic projection or ours. Not only do I want to know what's on Taylor's mind, I feel like I do - the window is wide open. Even when she's holding back she's like a cat that just swallowed a canary of a role and isn't afraid to let a few feathers fall out of her mouth. Harris would just waft into the room with one of the feathers in her arms, cradling it like she thinks its her child, the one who drowned as an infant in the bath and everyone said was her fault but you don't find that out until the "shocking" tea time denouement.

No, there's only one reason to re-watch the 1963 HAUNTING: foxy lesbian psychic Claire Bloom, especially in the sexy bed scene with Harris. But there are three reasons to see the 1999 edition: the gorgeous interior sets (the unique attempts to make the house seem alive are very Lacanian), and the two ladies. Sure sure sure, who am I to dare declare the 1963 HAUNTING overrated and as drab as a sunny afternoon wasted watching SOUND OF MUSIC in the school auditorium? I'm just a man who escaped that auditorium. Who went to the bathroom and never came back. And now I'm standing before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lili Taylor as they run hand-in-hand through wild dark sets, and feeling the grueling slog of that escape from a cold wet Monday finally melt off me, as if from a slug of laudanum with a Jaeger chaser. Mmmmm--so dark.... and so gloriously, calorically empty, like the warm glow of a phantom fireplace in the mind of a dying match girl. Take me away, ice queen. I'll sleep a Tuesday half away in your maroon fur collar, a Cheshire pair of eyes that at last have found a nest.