Not Very: THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY Review

Molly Hartley suffers from hallucinations, headaches, nightmares, bad cell phone reception, an overly-protective father, an insane mother, and a director who loves SHOCK cuts.

Mickey Liddell's The Haunting of Molly Hartley is too timid to dig into the deeper issues it eventually raises, so instead much of the running time is devoted to a surfeit of SURPRISE "scares," accompanied, of course, by SLAMMIN' sound effects and/or a random discordant musical chord. When the movie isn't trying to FRIGHTEN you with an unexpected finger on the shoulder or the unexpected THUMP of the daily mail as it COLLIDES with the wooden floor, it THREATENS to bore you to tears with mind-numbingly banal parental conflicts and/or tired HIGH school anti-dramatics.

It's not much of a SPOILER to reveal that Molly Hartley is a watered-down SPAWN of Rosemary's Baby and any one of a hundred semi-religious horror flicks about an unholy deal made at birth. (Take one look at the poster.) A preamble set in 1997 shows a father killing his daughter just days before she turns 18, muttering "I don't blame you, I blame myself ... I'm so sorry ... I have to save you ... I can't let you become one of them" (or words to that effect).

Already we can anticipate that the father must have been in league either with an alien race or with the Devil (or some other horrific evil), so when the present-day story of Molly (Haley Bennett) begins, it's easy to pick up on the clues: Molly's Dad (Jake Weber) wanted a fresh start, Molly has to begin her senior year at a new prep school, Mom is not around, Molly doesn't want to talk about Mom, Molly has headaches, bad dreams, and nosebleeds.

The rest of Molly's recent past is quickly sketched in, first with a flashback and then an exposition scene. Her Mom tried to kill her, muttering "I'm so sorry ... I have to save you ... You don't know what you're going to become" (or words to that effect), and Molly is left with a scar on her chest where her Mom plunged a knife into her. Hmm, wonder what that all means?

Dad is in denial, Dad still visits Mom (who's institutionalized nearby), Dad embarrasses Molly at school, Dad insists Molly see the counselor on her first day of class, Dad brings home Chinese food, Molly isn't hungry. When Molly and her Dad aren't quietly disagreeing, Molly is being courted by Joseph Young (Chace Crawford), who just happens to be the cutest and richest boy in school, and makes friends with lightly rebellious Leah (Shannon Marie Woodward) and enemies with Joseph's girlfriend (AnnaLynne McCord). Molly ends up returning to see the school counseler (Nina Siemaszko), who plies her with platitudes.

All this is quite old hat, as are the fake and phony scares, which quickly become tiresome with their regularity.

The one element that is briefly welcome is Molly's openly religious school mate Alexis (Shanna Collins). Ignoring the derision she receives from other students, she still constantly asks Molly if she's been saved, invites her to her Bible study group, and offers to help her spiritually. Molly turns her down without saying why; we know that her mother sounded like a religious nutjob when she tried to kill her, so it's understandable why Molly would shy away from any religious confrontation, but some kind of spirited disagreement, in which both girls could have made cogent arguments for and against spirituality or organized religion, might have given the material shape and/or edge. It might have even -- horrors! -- sparked a post-screening discussion by the teen audience that is targeted by this flick (rated PG-13 in the US, which is open to everyone).

Instead, any talk of specific spirituality is carefully avoided until it's too late to serve as anything but a plot device, leading to an utterly flat ending that doesn't go anywhere and doesn't reveal anything about Molly's fate.

Making his directorial debut, Mickey Liddell doesn't display any aptitude for the material. He's a veteran producer, and worked on two TV shows that I quite enjoyed (Everwood, Jack & Bobby), but he can't even bring life to the high school mini-soap opera that plays peek-a-boo with what's supposed to be the scarier stuff.

Obviously, horror movies don't need explicit violence to be unsettling or disturbing. I was hoping for an atmospheric ghost story or at least a clever riff on an old theme. Unfortunately, The Haunting of Molly Hartley carefully avoids any potentially interesting or inflammatory turns, and thus could be better titled The Boring of Molly Hartley.