Runtime: 94 minutes
Directed by: Daniel
Farrands
Starring: Hilary Duff,
Jonathan Bennett, Lydia Hearst, Pawel Szajda, Ryan Cargill
From: Some companies which
should probably be embarrassed
I was pleasantly surprised by the results from the Oscars tonight. Last night I viewed a movie that is almost as far away from an Academy Award winner for Best Picture that you can get:
Sometimes I see a movie because I can tell a good story about it.
This being one of them came about due to a Facebook post, of all things. A young lady I know shared a post concerning an Instagram post that Hilary Duff made on the set of this film. Some people (including my friend) considered the post to be insensitive of Tate and her unborn child. I won't get into the whole rigmarole as it resulted in a discussion both of “being woke” and “cancel culture”; of course, this means that the thread was a total disaster. I only remarked that I knew of the rotten reputation this has due to several YouTube reviews I've come across. It wasn't something I was planning on ever checking out as this picture sounded downright offensive, the wrong kind of exploitation.
I understand why Sharon's sister Debra was aghast about this; besides the crass nature, the movie is a fictional look at a real life tragedy which actually goes supernatural at times and is based on a dream that Tate apparently had a year before her death where she was murdered, and that's what this is all about... her being haunted by various dreams & premonitions, pondering if she could change her fate, etc. Believe it or not, this artless schlock was actually pretentious. Then there's how this ends... appalling in numerous ways. Arguably even worse was the filmmaking craft you see here, or lack thereof. The outdoor scenes were obviously dubbed because they did not even have any sort of mics worth a darn, the CG is ghastly in quality, the script and dialogue is incredibly on the nose, and worst of all... it pays no respect to Sharon Tate, her friends, or all the people that were killed in August of 1969.
This has more in common w/ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than you might expect; there's a film I did not love yet of course I can say that was a much better tale involving Tate and Margot Robbie was far greater than Hilary Duff, although Duff did not give the worst performance nor did she have the most laughable/befuddling accent... one guy sounded like a D-rate version of Dracula. Hollywood at least greatly presented Los Angeles in 1969 while Haunting is made on the cheap and you don't believe it was the year of Woodstock. At least Hollywood was not padded with multiple dream sequences, wobbly drone shots, ponderous scenes, real life footage that includes clips from the aftermath of the murder, potshots at Roman Polanski because we know in modern times that he's a creep, and a whole lot of boredom. This might sound entertaining if I gave a spoiler-filled review of the movie... but it's just so dull there's no campy laughs to be had.
This “young lady I know,” I did not go into specifics on why this movie has made so many mad, even though I had practically had everything spoiled beforehand; I just brought up how I heard it was tasteless. Because reasons, The Haunting of Sharon Tate would be something real upsetting to her so I am glad this is something she will avoid. Also brought up was how the same director just released a Nicole Brown Simpson picture that by all accounts is even worse than this, which is a big reason why Haunting did not get the lowest of the low ratings from moi; of course, she was appalled. The thing I most do not understand is that the director is Daniel Farrands, who created two tremendous documentaries in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th; I highly recommend both. I cannot comprehend why his fictional movies being such slapdash affairs that are so poor in quality, not to mention the gross nature of those films or how the scripts are total amateur hour. He DID write Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers... but from what I understand, neither version of the movie came close to what his original script was.
The main reason why I saw this was that it was free on Prime; perhaps one day I'll discover for myself if The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is as much an atrocity as all reviews have said it is... it is something I'll never look forward to, that is all I can say for certain.
This being one of them came about due to a Facebook post, of all things. A young lady I know shared a post concerning an Instagram post that Hilary Duff made on the set of this film. Some people (including my friend) considered the post to be insensitive of Tate and her unborn child. I won't get into the whole rigmarole as it resulted in a discussion both of “being woke” and “cancel culture”; of course, this means that the thread was a total disaster. I only remarked that I knew of the rotten reputation this has due to several YouTube reviews I've come across. It wasn't something I was planning on ever checking out as this picture sounded downright offensive, the wrong kind of exploitation.
I understand why Sharon's sister Debra was aghast about this; besides the crass nature, the movie is a fictional look at a real life tragedy which actually goes supernatural at times and is based on a dream that Tate apparently had a year before her death where she was murdered, and that's what this is all about... her being haunted by various dreams & premonitions, pondering if she could change her fate, etc. Believe it or not, this artless schlock was actually pretentious. Then there's how this ends... appalling in numerous ways. Arguably even worse was the filmmaking craft you see here, or lack thereof. The outdoor scenes were obviously dubbed because they did not even have any sort of mics worth a darn, the CG is ghastly in quality, the script and dialogue is incredibly on the nose, and worst of all... it pays no respect to Sharon Tate, her friends, or all the people that were killed in August of 1969.
This has more in common w/ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than you might expect; there's a film I did not love yet of course I can say that was a much better tale involving Tate and Margot Robbie was far greater than Hilary Duff, although Duff did not give the worst performance nor did she have the most laughable/befuddling accent... one guy sounded like a D-rate version of Dracula. Hollywood at least greatly presented Los Angeles in 1969 while Haunting is made on the cheap and you don't believe it was the year of Woodstock. At least Hollywood was not padded with multiple dream sequences, wobbly drone shots, ponderous scenes, real life footage that includes clips from the aftermath of the murder, potshots at Roman Polanski because we know in modern times that he's a creep, and a whole lot of boredom. This might sound entertaining if I gave a spoiler-filled review of the movie... but it's just so dull there's no campy laughs to be had.
This “young lady I know,” I did not go into specifics on why this movie has made so many mad, even though I had practically had everything spoiled beforehand; I just brought up how I heard it was tasteless. Because reasons, The Haunting of Sharon Tate would be something real upsetting to her so I am glad this is something she will avoid. Also brought up was how the same director just released a Nicole Brown Simpson picture that by all accounts is even worse than this, which is a big reason why Haunting did not get the lowest of the low ratings from moi; of course, she was appalled. The thing I most do not understand is that the director is Daniel Farrands, who created two tremendous documentaries in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th; I highly recommend both. I cannot comprehend why his fictional movies being such slapdash affairs that are so poor in quality, not to mention the gross nature of those films or how the scripts are total amateur hour. He DID write Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers... but from what I understand, neither version of the movie came close to what his original script was.
The main reason why I saw this was that it was free on Prime; perhaps one day I'll discover for myself if The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is as much an atrocity as all reviews have said it is... it is something I'll never look forward to, that is all I can say for certain.
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