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"When the credits role, you're baffled at the "moral" of the story, and you quickly forget what you just watched by the time you step out of the theater."
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The problems with The Haunting of Molly Hartley started with the film's marketing, as it gave away the "twist" ending in the synopsis, and therefore, any chance of suspense the film might have had. Straight from the synopsis: "A teenage girl discovers that her parents made a pact with the devil to save her life". However, in the film, this "discovery" is set up as the big "revelation" in the third act, and not a throwaway plot point we learn from the very beginning.
Besides spoiling itself, Molly Hartley's problems continue when it tries to figure out what kind of horror movie it's trying to be. In the flashback opening sequence, it starts out feeling like a slasher movie in the woods (Friday the 13th), then it switches to the likes of religious horror, with scary / crazy religious mothers and schoolmates (Carrie White's mom in Carrie), then it tries for a touch of "possessed" or "exorcised" horror (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), and tops it off with "private school" horror (The Craft), all the while pretending to be a teen-angst movie, but without the angst.
One of the biggest problems is at the film's core. Molly Hartley isn't about the haunting of anyone. No, it's really about watching a girl with serious issues lose her mind, and in the process, we lose our minds along with her. She hears things; she sees things; she has nightmares about her crazy mother. This chick isn't being haunted by anything, she's just going crazy! Or is she? You're never really sure, so when her visions actually come true, you don't know whether to believe her or to think that she was having just another episode. The Nightmare on Elm St. series handled the "Is it a dream or is it real?" very well. Molly Hartley dupes you enough times that you assume nothing is real -- and when it is you don't believe it.
What drives me crazy about Hollywood making films like this (obviously aimed at preteen girls and not true fans of the genre) is that the predictability of their formula in that it always includes: a.) scary music; b.) high-school kids; and c.) boo scares -- boo scares being the worse offense of them all, and Molly Hartley is chock-full of them from the get-go. You've experienced boo scares before and while sometimes they're effective, most times they make you hate yourself for jumping because they weren't really scary at all. You know the drill: a quiet moment in the movie when all of a sudden something appears on the screen and the music blares, and you jump out of your seat -- not because it was scary, but because that's a human reflex. Case in point: no matter how you spin it, actions like mail going through the mail slot at just the right moment are not scary.
Maybe the biggest problem of Molly Hartley is Hartley herself, played by Haley Bennett. She's not a bad actress. I just didn't like her. You could say that her character isn't likable, and I'll give you that. But some actors have that likability even when their characters don't (Neve Campbell in Scream is a great example), and Bennett just doesn't have it. The opening girl was likable, even Hartley's friend (Shannon Marie Woodward) had that charm that the character of Molly Hartley needed but sourly lacked. Because I'm a fan of Gossip Girl, I should also mention Chace Crawford, the charming boy at school, who basically plays his signature role of Nate Archibald from the show -- nothing more, nothing less.
At the end of the day, The Haunting of Molly Hartley isn't really a horror movie. It's not a scary movie, and it's not a teen-angst movie either. It was simply watching a girl lose her mind, told through a cast of unlikable characters, scary music, and cheap boo scares. When the credits role, you're baffled at the "moral" of the story, and you quickly forget what you just watched by the time you step out of the theater. Molly Hartley's biggest problem was worse than merely being a bad horror movie aimed at preteen girls. The real issue is that it was completely forgettable.
Grade: D
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