“An American Haunting”. Worst movie ever!
I am what you would normally consider a positive person. I don’t like to say bad things about people or their works of art. But today, I am going to have to make an exception for the movie I rented last night.
An American Haunting has got to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Even the presence of acting veterans such as Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek could not save this flop.
An American Haunting is based on the true events of the Bell family, who lived in Tennessee. I won’t really go into the details of the story too much. I would prefer to focus on why the movie was so bad. If you would like to know more about the real story, just google “the Bell witch.”
The movie actually started out pretty good, but went South very quickly. First off, this movie has terrible sound design. Most of the surprise scenes are met with this awful cymbal crash. I’ve never heard this in a modern movie, and now I know why. Also, there are supposed to be ghostly whispers that torment the family. The whispers are so hoaky that they are almost comical. A teenage girl on a cell phone would have been more terrifying.
Also, the camera work is extremely annoying. I don’t blame this on the cinematographer, it was probably the director’s idea. Most of the scenes are shot really well. It’s the point of view of the entity that is so annoying. The camera sweeps around the room focusing on the faces of the family, capturing their reactions. This trick might have worked once, but it is driven into the ground after the fifth time. Also, while looking through the spirit’s eyes, the color switches randomly back and forth from color to Black and White. this was so poorly done, that it made me want to check the connections on the DVD player.
The main reason this movie is terrible is it’s ending. Granted, you can choose between four alternate endings…all of them bad. The biggest problem with Hollywood is that they feel the need to explain the movie for the audience. (A hallmark of bad story-telling,) This movie not only subjects you to an unnecessary explanation, you actually get it twice! The ghost actually materializes and tells the audience everything. Then there is a flashback sequence that shows you everything that happened.
I for one would have preferred the movie without all the explaining that takes up the last ten minutes of the movie. At least I could have felt confused by the bad story-telling, instead of nauseous about the worst ending in movie history.- Tony
December 5th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Hollywood just wants to make money. They have taken all of the balls it takes to say “Hey this is my ending! iF you don’t like it, F*** you!” and left them in their producers’ purses. Now every horror movie has its own set of alternate endings because no one had the balls or the creativity to stick to one ending.
….sorry, i had alot of sugar today.
December 5th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Yeah, well it’s funny that if you actually watch the movie, you realize that it probably had nothing to do with the producers (for once). After all, this is the director that made the Dungeons & Dragons movies, Courtney Solomon. And we know what winners those were. He even mentions on the DVD that no distribution company would pick this up so they had to do it themselves. I think that pretty much says it all.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Why couldn’t they just make a movie about the real haunting? Most possibly the worst movie of all time!!