This is my very first review. But after watching this series I felt that I had to sit down and write my thoughts on it.
First of all the main reason I watched The Haunting of Hill House was because of Mike Flanagan. So far, I felt like his was one of the most promising directors when it comes to horror movies, he seemed to understand what horror is about and he tried to avoid most of the stupid cliches that most of modern day horror movies are all about. But with this one..Oh boy. I just don't know where to start.
First of all.The jump scares. THE FREAKING JUMP SCARES. This series was totally devoid of ANY KIND of suspense or any sort of buildup. I lost count of how many times I was saying -heeeere comes a loud noise! -geeet ready for a stupid cgi demon face... I mean why? Besides of a couple of exceptions, my main two reactions when it came to these so called horror scenes, was either yawning or being annoyed by the stupidity and the predictability of these jump scares. Also when it came to the cgi or the make up, I also thought that they were either poor or unimaginative.
Then came the actors. First lets take the children actors. The were SO ANNOYING. I mean I get it,some of them were around 10 years old and you can only get so much out of a kid. But the hyperbole... I mean come on you can do better than that. Because it really felt as if they were instructed to act like that and it was so bad and distracting.
Moving on now to the main adult actors. I have seen some of them on previous Mike Flanagan movies and they were actually quite decent there. But here, they were just plain bad. I am not sure if the script was that bad or if they were instructed for their whole approach to their roles, but I swear I have never felt such a dislike about so many characters.This is probably the most irritating, unattractive set of characters I 've ever seen in a series. They were so dislikeable, that I honestly felt like turning it off at sometimes. And I guess a pretty large portion of that is based on the script, the dialogues and the monologues.. Most of the were either absurd and felt totally out of place, or they were SO corny and cheesy and they tried sooo hard to make me care and they failed miserably. With the exception of probably the last monologue, which was ok I guess, most of them were borderline stupid and also some of them were SO LONG.
It really felt like I 've wasted 10 hours of my life.I watched the whole thing because I kept telling myself something is gonna change,maybe there is a clever twist, maybe....But no. I cant find a single redeeming quality about this series. It had a very nice set design, I have to give it that, the house looked really nice and the whole premise seemed to be interesting ,and around the end of the series it felt like the plot was actually leading to something (which it didnt..) but besides that, I just can't help but wonder why this series has a 9.1 with 25.000+ votes. I am really shocked.
Review of The Haunting of Hill House
