The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019) Review
The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019) Review
Plagued by visions of her impending death, Hollywood actress Sharon Tate (Hilary Duff) tries to convince her friends that something terrible is about to happen, in the hopes of changing her destiny.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate arrives with three top awards under its belt from the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival – Best Horror Film, Best Director and Best Actress for Hilary Duff. The Haunting of Sharon Tate is also the first in a planned series of films, with The Haunting of Nicole Brown Simpson to arrive next. It’s also one of many Charles Manson-inspired projects expected this year – the 50th anniversary of the unfortunate Sharon Tate’s murder – with a flick from director Quentin Tarantino covering similar ground expected to arrive later this year.
The film takes its inspiration from a quote from Sharon Tate that was published in an interview just a year before her untimely death. In the interview Tate talked about a nightmare she’d experienced where a strange man was in her house and that both her and her friend Jay Sebring were tied up with their throats slit open. However, despite the awards won and the fact that this film takes its inspiration from Sharon Tate’s ominously prophetic nightmare, her sister Debra Tate is disgusted by writer/director Daniel Farrands’ movie. She claims that the movie is exploitative and fictionalized to the point that the truth no longer exists in the story’s telling – I concur. I found The Haunting of Sharon Tate vulgar, a minimally plotted exercise in poor taste that exploits the real-life murder of a young pregnant woman – and her friends – for gory thrills.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is formulaic and labours every single point that the very little that it actually has to say is hit home with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. We can see that our lead character has a bump to indicate that she is pregnant but for our writer/director that simply won’t do. He has to have the camera linger on her bump or chuck in dialogue to remind the viewer every two minutes lest we forget about her condition. Director Daniel Farrands also labours the point that the inspiration for his movie came from Tate’s nightmare opening his film with Edgar Allan Poe’s quote about a dream within a dream and repeated ‘shock’ dream sequences. Yes, we get it, she had a nightmare, but couldn’t we have had a well-structured story in place of this sadly one-note affair?
The Haunting of Sharon Tate takes a real-life atrocity and has turned it into an Elm Street/The Strangers hybrid which sensationalises such tragic events. The script is littered with a sense of foreboding without actually ever adding much else to the mix and it becomes irritating very quickly. The film is so bereft of ideas that it actually decides to show the graphic denouement as tasteless ‘shock’ dream sequence halfway through the movie. It’s stacked to the hilt with cliché – people appearing out of the background for a predictable ‘boo’ moment, blood pouring from bath taps, a dog running off in the middle of the night only to be found dead the next day – and the film ultimately amounts to nothing more than a standard slasher flick that is in such poor taste it leaves you feeling uneasy watching it.
THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE is released on 8th April) and available to pre order via the link below
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/the-haunting-of-sharon-tate/id1451934080
