"Some houses are born bad," and they get worse when Steven Spielberg gets involved with the overblown, under-thought remake of THE HAUNTING, on Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment.

After her invalid mother dies, daughter/caregiver Eleanor Vance (Lili Taylor, I SHOT ANDY WARHOL) is about to lose the only home she has known since childhood since her mother put her married sister (Virginia Madsen, THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT) and her husband (Tom Irwin, DECIEVED) in charge of her will and they want to sell. Answering an ad for a paying experiment for people with sleep disorders, Eleanor travels deep into the Berkshires to gothic manor Hill House where psychologist Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson, TAKEN) is actually doing an unethical experiment on the nature of fear ("You don't tell the rats they're in the maze," he says to his concerned dean). Her fellow test subjects are bisexual Bohemian artist Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones, THE MARK OF ZORRO) and professional guinea pig Luke (Owen Wilson, BOTTLE ROCKET) who barely have time to question why the experiment is taking place in the "Addams Family mansion" before vibe-sensitive assistant Mary (Alix Koromzay, MIMIC) nearly loses an eye to a snapped harpsichord string, and the quartet are left to their own devices when housekeeper Mrs. Dudley (Marian Seldes, AFFLICTION) and caretaker Mr. Dudley (Bruce Dern, THE BURBS) lock the gates and leave for the night ("No one lives any nearer than town, no one will come any nearer than that: in the night, in the dark"). While terrifying banging in the night turns out to be old pipes, the four soon discover that the things that go bump in the night in Hill House are not just unnatural, they're evil.

While producer Steven Spielberg made one of the most memorable haunted house films of the eighties with POLTERGEIST – on which, like this film, there were rumors that he did more than produce – DreamWorks' remake of THE HAUNTING has as little to do with Robert Wise's masterful 1963 film and Shirley Jackson's source novel and plays at times more like a PG-13 remake of the Richard Matheson adaptation THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (the Stephen King mini-series ROSE RED from 2002 was a more watchable conflation of elements from both Jackson and Matheson novels). The film tries to hit all the marks from the Wise film but usually does so embarrassingly, from Theo's here-unambiguous bisexuality that makes her little more than a clothes horse in Prada boots ("Milan, not New York") to the writing on the wall (blood red here) and "whose hand was a I holding" bits. The backstory involving Hill House's builder Hugh Crane is more suited to a haunted house attraction, and the film's moments of blunt violence are more off-putting than shocking. Neeson and Zeta-Jones have their moments but are let down by a bum script, while Wilson's goofy shtick is perhaps more suited to film's approach to the material. Taylor is no Julie Harris but she is pretty good until the climax in which she has to utter some of the worst defiant dialogue when confronting the ghost. Director Jan de Bont (THE FOURTH MAN) was one of the industry's gifted cinematographers – coming to Hollywood with Paul Verhoeven and lensing films like FLATLINERS and JEWEL OF THE NILE – but showed no promise as a director with films like SPEED and TWISTER, so one assumes that he was picked for THE HAUNTING by Spielberg as a jobbing director. The film's best elements are the ravishing Byzantine production design of Eugenio Zanetti (RESTORATION) – the striking real-life exterior is the Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire which is the study abroad center of Indiana's University of Evansville while the interiors barring one or two shots actually inside Harlaxton are a set designed by Zanetti and built inside an airplane hangar including the massive great hall – and the lighting of Karl Walter Lindenlaub (STARGATE) with Ronnie Taylor (OPERA, GANDHI) as second unit DP. The scoring of Jerry Goldsmith (THE OMEN) is lacking inspiration, failing to eke out any warmth with themes that seem to reference POLTERGEIST. The Industrial Lights and Magic visual effects are technically proficient but one does not expect visible spectral apparitions or griffin statues coming to life in Hill House, while K.N.B. provides some minor make-up effects work. Todd Field, who plays Marrow's other assistant, left the production early for reshoots on Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT; and THE HAUNTING itself was purportedly also subject to post-production interference (the climax was probably a reshoot). Screenwriter David Self – whose screenplay included a fourth test subject who vanished upon arrival only to turn up as a corpse during the filmed scene in which Marrow is nearly drowned in the conservatory fountain – later penned the terrible remake of THE WOLFMAN. American International's Samuel Z. Arkoff is listed as an uncredited producer, but his daughter Donna Roth (FORCES OF NATURE) is credited along with Jack Arnold's daughter Susan (GROSSE POINT BLANK) and Spielberg regular Colin Wilson (AMISTAD).