6/15/09

Screw You, Molly Hartley!


Have not posted much lately - been busy between work and family obligations. Finally, the other night I had a few hours to myself and settled in to watch a movie. Reaching into the batch of red envelopes that were sitting by the TV, I snatched The Haunting of Molly Hartley out of the pile, popped it into the DVD player and ...

... an hour and a half later I wanted to kick in the TV screen.

Just when I thought mainstream, modern horror could get no worse, along comes Molly Fucking Hartley and her bland face, bloody nose, Annie Hall tie, and whiny voice.

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, this movie is Dreadful with a capital D.

Borrowing bits from To the Devil a Daughter, Satan's School from Girls, Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, ...Molly Hartley tells the lame-ass tale of a young lady in some type of private school where they teach Dante's Inferno in English class, and, apparently, not much else. The students all wear uniforms, but you can tell them apart (especially the girls) by their hair. The "troubled" one has a poker straight, razor cut; the "slutty" one has curly hair; the "poor" one has tangled hair...and, well, you get the point. That's pretty much it for character development.

So Molly is a mess, see her mother tried to kill her and is now in an asylum, and now, Molly's dad has moved her away from the scene of the crime to a new town and a new school in the hopes that everything will be A-OK.

It's not, of course. You see, Molly has nose bleeds, and hears voices and (sometimes, well once really) is prone to feats of super-human strength.

It's a thriller-paint-by-the-numbers story as Molly's tale unravels and the Devil (sort of) comes to claim what is rightly his.

To add insult to injury, when I put the DVD in my computer to get a few screen grabs for this posting, I was informed that due to some anti-piracy thingy, the movie would not play. Screw you, Molly Hartley!

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