An American Haunting sets new records for incompetence of creation and boring content.
Written for the screen, produced, and directed by Courtney Solomon, a twat whose only film credit is the Dungeons & Dragons movie, that legendary clusterfuck is overshadowed by this tremendous turd.
Some might raise an eyebrow at that contention and, surely enough, Haunting lacks Dungeons & Dragons' low production value, unintelligible story, terrible acting, totally inappropriate subject matter, and lack of any atmosphere. But, at the same time, Haunting is one of the most dull, stagnant and pointless movies ever to be filmed.
If you hadn't heard, this movie features the totally for real tale of The Bell Witch, so real that even totally fucking crazy shitbag former President Andrew Jackson attempted to hunt and exorcise the demonic presence himself. (Though fans of the legends are quick to point out that nothing in the movie is even really based on any of the dozens of conflicting tales, instead basing the whole thing off of a recent dramatized novel of the legend.)
So, this is of course a movie for the foil-hats, people who believe in ghosts, curses, and evil spells: total cunts and 14-year-old girls.
To make a long story short and "ruin" the movie for you, the plot is thus: father and neighbor get into land dispute, which most legends claim is the reason for the curse; daughter starts suffering from ghostly attacks; teacher who is too close to daughter helps to stop it; creepy ghost is unstoppable; everything goes bad; people sit around and perform in tedious, boring, and obscenely stupid scenes; turns out the ghost is a "protector" spirit, revealing to the others that the daughter has been raped by the father.
All this is bookended by another retarded modern day tale where the same thing is happening to another young girl, the spirit being the ghost of raped daughter, warning the mother of her ex-husband's molestation of their child.
So, essentially the legend of the Bell Witch is nothing more than the stupidest episode of "Ghost Hunters: Special Victims Unit" that you could ever see.
The whole affair is deeply filtered in blue lighting and tries deperately to appear modern and trendy, but leaves out everything good about movies, such as story, pacing, editing, and direction. The acting is a decent attempt and young Rachel Hurd-Wood does her best to believably portray the ghost-stricken girl, though Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek appear to be reaching the bottom of the barrel on their careers (particularly Sutherland, who burns up the glory of his Beerfest cameo with this terrible nonsense) and James D'Arcy does himself no favors by being involved in the shitheap.
The direction is nothing but cobbled together scenes of nothing, boring talking, and spooky ghostly scenes where the effect of flashing from color to black & white are severely overused to the point of eyestrain.
The whole movie is an abortion of the highest order and everyone involved should be flogged or killed, if not sent to study under Uwe Boll.
