Okay, I will try my very best to make this a somewhat "fair" review. I wanted to like this movie. And I'm not just saying that either. I love teen horror movies, I'm a big fan of such fare as The Craft and The Covenant, and I sometimes even like questionable fare like I Know Who Killed Me and The Eye. The Haunting of Molly Hartley, however, was equally as bad being drowned in a vat of holy water, like one of the characters in the movie. It stings the eyes and the soul and it's void of any sort of real emotion. The only scenes that were even worth watching were those which involved heartthrob Chace Crawford, but more on that later. The Haunting of Molly Hartley is directed by first-timer Mickey Liddell, and has a cast which consists of (from best to worst) Chace Crawford, Shannon Marie Woodward, Haley Bennett, AnnaLynne McCord, Shanna Collins, and Jake Weber.
Molly Hartley has had a tough life. Her mother tried to kill her, but she survived, and now she's trying to put her troubled past behind her by starting anew. As the theatrical trailer tells you, Molly's parents made a deal with the devil to save her life, but the day she turns 18, her soul will belong to him.
Okay, so the plot wasn't the best thing in the world, but it could have easily evolved into a semi-decent Halloween flick. Instead, for the entirety of the film, the script remains stuck in the mud. It would all make sense, had things led anywhere. Instead, the movie's last fifteen minutes make everything else seem random. Things are thrown constantly at you nonstop, and you expect them to make sense or be explained at a later time, as is the formula for most movies. For instance, Molly's mother appears in the bathroom once, and she says "The nurse believed me, so she let me out." We are never given any explanation for this. No funeral for the mother, no mourning from the father or daughter, no arrest of the nurse, no glimpse of the mental hospital which could have been a potentially terrifying setup. Everywhere there's potential, it is simply squandered in favor of moving quickly.
That leads me to another complaint. The film is literally 87 minutes long. With movies like Saw V, a fast pace is warmly welcomed, as we already know most of the characters. With something like Molly Hartley, if we had more time for characters, setup, everything basically, then it would become an exponentially better film. Honestly, at its best, Haunting of Molly Hartley is a teen drama. The scenes at Joseph's house work so well because they aren't trying to hard to scare us, they are genuinely interesting. In some scenes, there are echoes of great teen shows like Gossip Girl and 90210, but then the very next it completely falls apart.
At its worst, this film fails as a "scary" movie. If the long, drawn-out scare scenes that lead to nothing were stripped away, we would be left (at most) with a half-hour long film. There was literally nothing to this movie. There's a mother with scissors, a ghost with no explanation who appears for a fraction of a second in one scene, and a "devil" who is better left in made-for-TV movies. Halloween: H20 was the perfect scare formula. At first, it would fake the audience out a couple times with a few "false" scares, but then it got into the really terrifying stuff and didn't let up. The Haunting of Molly Hartley takes the opposite route. It supplies the audience with an endless supply of "false" scares and never gets in to the good stuff. It tried to have plot twists, but they made no sense when coupled with the rest of the movie.
Even with all these complaints (and I could go on for a very, very long time), I kept watching the movie just for Chace Crawford and in the hopes that it would get better and that the end of the movie would leave me breathless. While Crawford tries really, really hard, he simply cannot overcome the terrible script or even the absolutely ridiculous twists and turns of the plot. As if the movie wasn't bad enough already, the final fifteen minutes alone make The Haunting of Molly Hartley one of the worst movies of the year. It tries to have a Saw-esquire ending, and it tried to be clever about it, but the end leaves so many major characters and events in the movie in the dust that it's almost something a kindergartener could have written.
If it's not obvious enough, this movie was absolutely, positively, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Don't waste your money on it, whatever you do. It was absolutely awful. In the end, you feel empty, as if you have wasted time in your life that you will NEVER get back. It's a shame, too. This movie had such wasted potential. It could have been great. Instead, it ended up about as scary as a towel.
Molly Hartley has had a tough life. Her mother tried to kill her, but she survived, and now she's trying to put her troubled past behind her by starting anew. As the theatrical trailer tells you, Molly's parents made a deal with the devil to save her life, but the day she turns 18, her soul will belong to him.
Okay, so the plot wasn't the best thing in the world, but it could have easily evolved into a semi-decent Halloween flick. Instead, for the entirety of the film, the script remains stuck in the mud. It would all make sense, had things led anywhere. Instead, the movie's last fifteen minutes make everything else seem random. Things are thrown constantly at you nonstop, and you expect them to make sense or be explained at a later time, as is the formula for most movies. For instance, Molly's mother appears in the bathroom once, and she says "The nurse believed me, so she let me out." We are never given any explanation for this. No funeral for the mother, no mourning from the father or daughter, no arrest of the nurse, no glimpse of the mental hospital which could have been a potentially terrifying setup. Everywhere there's potential, it is simply squandered in favor of moving quickly.
That leads me to another complaint. The film is literally 87 minutes long. With movies like Saw V, a fast pace is warmly welcomed, as we already know most of the characters. With something like Molly Hartley, if we had more time for characters, setup, everything basically, then it would become an exponentially better film. Honestly, at its best, Haunting of Molly Hartley is a teen drama. The scenes at Joseph's house work so well because they aren't trying to hard to scare us, they are genuinely interesting. In some scenes, there are echoes of great teen shows like Gossip Girl and 90210, but then the very next it completely falls apart.
At its worst, this film fails as a "scary" movie. If the long, drawn-out scare scenes that lead to nothing were stripped away, we would be left (at most) with a half-hour long film. There was literally nothing to this movie. There's a mother with scissors, a ghost with no explanation who appears for a fraction of a second in one scene, and a "devil" who is better left in made-for-TV movies. Halloween: H20 was the perfect scare formula. At first, it would fake the audience out a couple times with a few "false" scares, but then it got into the really terrifying stuff and didn't let up. The Haunting of Molly Hartley takes the opposite route. It supplies the audience with an endless supply of "false" scares and never gets in to the good stuff. It tried to have plot twists, but they made no sense when coupled with the rest of the movie.
Even with all these complaints (and I could go on for a very, very long time), I kept watching the movie just for Chace Crawford and in the hopes that it would get better and that the end of the movie would leave me breathless. While Crawford tries really, really hard, he simply cannot overcome the terrible script or even the absolutely ridiculous twists and turns of the plot. As if the movie wasn't bad enough already, the final fifteen minutes alone make The Haunting of Molly Hartley one of the worst movies of the year. It tries to have a Saw-esquire ending, and it tried to be clever about it, but the end leaves so many major characters and events in the movie in the dust that it's almost something a kindergartener could have written.
If it's not obvious enough, this movie was absolutely, positively, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Don't waste your money on it, whatever you do. It was absolutely awful. In the end, you feel empty, as if you have wasted time in your life that you will NEVER get back. It's a shame, too. This movie had such wasted potential. It could have been great. Instead, it ended up about as scary as a towel.