Review: The Haunting of Molly Hartley
Very Little Haunting Makes Molly Hartley Likely to Disappoint
Jun 13, 2009
The Haunting of Molly Hartley is a movie that will likely keep more than a few people awake at night. They probably won’t be in need of a nightlight, though. Rather, anyone who sits down to this low-budget affair expecting an insomnia-inducing chiller will go to bed too angry to sleep.
Well-prepared viewers, however, should sleep just fine. Molly Hartley has gotten quite a few scathing reviews from loveseat critics (just check its abysmal IMDB and Netflix ratings), but most of the complaints are that the movie is boring and just not scary. Spoiler alert – the movie is not scary at all. But like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (that other "horror" movie that pulled the wool over so many viewers' eyes) it shouldn’t be quite as boring for anyone who knows not to expect a nightmarish hell ride.
A Thriller Unworthy of Praise
Don’t mistake these words for praise, since the movie is hardly worth a glowing review. It suffers from the same problems that hinder any number of horror films these days. Foremost of all are the clichéd false scares. A third of the way through the movie and one might think the only things haunting Molly Hartley are squawking black birds and dogs barking loudly through fences.
The other obvious problem is the inane plot. To sum it up without ruining the movie (any more than the movie already ruins itself), a high school student named Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett) starts having visions of her crazy mother, who tried to stab her and is locked up in an asylum. What Molly doesn’t know is that her mother didn’t want to face the coming of her daughter’s eighteenth birthday because poor Molly, upon turning eighteen, would be taken away from her family by a woman with malicious intent.
What exactly awaits Molly once she is taken is never made clear. Will she serve as a minion to the devil? Does she become the physical embodiment of Satan himself? The movie hints at the existence of some devilish cult without spoiling the fun by actually revealing any important details.
Teen Horror Turns Into High School Drama
Similar in style to the teen thrillers of yesteryear (aka, the late 90s), Molly Hartley doesn’t need to be smart to satisfy its target audience. So why all this talk about being boring? After about twenty-five minutes, the movie forgets that it’s supposed be scary and instead turns into an ABC Family teen drama. The focus shifts away from visions of psychotic mother to “dreamy boy from class is having a party and he invited me!” Typical high school melodrama follows. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be The Secret Life of the Haunted Teenager.
While no one is going to mistake this for an intelligent thriller, it is better than a handful of horrors that have checked into theaters in recent years (among them I Know Who Killed Me and The Invisible). Still, compared to the movies (and even the TV shows) it emulates, The Haunting of Molly Hartley fails to impress.
The Haunting of Molly Hartley co-stars Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl fame as Joseph Young.
