The Haunting of Molly Hartley

Do they have a name for the sound effect used in horror movies when someone comes popping up seemingly out of nowhere? You know, those scenes where a character is slowly making his or her way through a dark area, the quiet and ominous music is whispering on the soundtrack, and then someone or something just out of focus suddenly pops up in front of them, while a noise that kind of sounds like someone dropping 20 pairs of pots and pans all at once blasts our eardrums in an attempt to make the audience jump? It must have a name, because The Haunting of Molly Hartley uses this cheap technique to ridiculous extremes.

How ridiculous? Mail being delivered through a slot door is accompanied by that jolting sound effect. An alarm clock going off also is greeted by the same jarring and blasting tone. Heck, in the first four minutes of the movie, there's no less than three of these moments in almost rapid succession. Of course, each time something jumps out at the frightened person, it turns out to be something harmless. In the opening scene, the first one turns out to be a bird, the second a girl's boyfriend, and the third the same girl's father. Why do innocent people in horror movies like to wait in the shadows, and jump out at the main character? Do they somehow know what kind of movie they're in, and think it's their duty to just jump out and scare the willies out of the person, instead of simply just walking up and saying "hi"? Imagine how tiresome that would get after a while. Not only would this obviously get tiresome to Molly, it gets extremely tiresome to anyone watching the movie. We share her pain.

But it appears poor Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett) has bigger problems. You see, a year or so ago, her mom went crazy and tried to stab her with a pair of scissors. Now mom's in an asylum, and Molly along with her father, Robert (Jake Weber), are trying to move on and start over. Molly goes to a new private school, where almost everyone seems to know a lot about her past, and mainly treat her as an outcast. Not that everyone's against her. There's a cute guy named Joseph (Chace Crawford from TV's Gossip Girl) who's always hitting on her (when he's not jumping out at her from the shadows of the school library and saying "boo" to her, of course), there's a "bad girl" type (Shannon Marie Woodward) who basically dishes out sarcasm as if it were going out of style, and there's a Christian extremist girl (Shanna Collins) who usually seems nice enough, but also seems a bit too involved with her religious beliefs and forcing them onto her friends. Speaking of religion, whenever someone mentions God or the Bible, Molly gets a nosebleed and starts having panic attacks. She also hears ghostly whispers wherever she goes, and sometimes has nightmarish hallucinations of her psycho mother coming to kill her. Her doctor thinks these are caused by a benign brain tumor he's discovered within her, but judging by the title of the movie, we know Molly should get a second opinion.

We learn about Molly's past through flashbacks, and the pieces start to fall into place. We know whatever's going on has something to do with her upcoming 18th birthday, because the characters keep on mentioning she's going to turn 18 soon, and the film's opening sequence depicts a completely different girl about to turn 18 being killed by her father before "they" can get to her. We get somewhat of an idea of what's going on and why Molly is hearing voices and seemingly is starting to develop super strength (as evidenced when she beats up a mean girl at a party), but the movie never quite develops its own idea. It instead focuses mainly on issues you usually find on prime time teen soap operas, like popularity and love triangles. Yes, that's right, the main character may or may not have ties to Satan himself, and the movie seems more interested in whether or not Molly will go on a date with the cute guy who likes her. Does that sound wrong to you? The movie never really builds any genuine suspense or scares from its premise, and seems content to just throw countless false alarms and loud noises on the soundtrack. And when something actually does happen (someone dies in Molly's own house), the movie doesn't even try to explain what her father did with the body when company comes to visit that same day.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley has all the earmarks and production values of a straight to DVD movie, or something you might come across on late night cable, then change the channel after watching only five minutes. What it's doing on the big screen, I have no idea. It seems far too timid to be a horror movie, almost as if it's afraid it might wind up scaring itself. Although I wasn't enjoying the movie while I was watching it, I at least was able to say that it was coherent for most of its running time. Then the ending came, and while I won't spoil it, I will say it felt like I was missing something. Like a couple scenes that should have been there were cut out for some reason. I've seen lots of bad endings that have left me out of the theater angry, but this one left me angry and blank. I was at a loss as to what had just happened, how it had happened, and why it was so abrupt. I think I have a pretty good idea what happened, but the way the ending has been edited, it leaves it completely open for interpretation. This can be a good thing. In this case, it's not. We walk out feeling ripped off.

The performances at least get the job done, but there's absolutely nothing special about them. In fact, there's absolutely nothing special at all about Molly Hartley. I don't expect every movie to be a groundbreaking experience, but when I get the sense that there's absolutely no effort put into what I'm watching, I grow restless. That's how I felt watching this. It's like eating generic food. You know, the kind of food that you can feel filling you up, but you're not exactly enjoying it in any way? This is cinematic generic food for your eyes and your brain.

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