The Haunting of Sarah Hardy

Initially interesting movie with a plot that held promise. Sela Ward's performance was better than what audiences have come to expect in television movies. The build up of suspense started with increasing expectancy. I felt that the ending was anti-climatic and sputtered into confusion. I give 3 stars out of 10.

Directed by Jerry London and adapted to teleplay by Thomas Baum from the novel, The Crossing, written by Jim Flanagan. It stars Sela Ward, Michael Woods, Roscoe Born, Morgan Fairchild and Polly Bergen.

After a troubled childhood that saw her father die and her mother go mad to the point of suicide, Sarah Hardy (Ward) blossoms into a beautiful woman and marries a handsome man. In spite of her close friends concerns, Sarah and her husband decide to move back to the family home of her childhood, The Pines. It's not long before strange occurrences begin to unnerve Sarah at The Pines. Is her mother not really dead, is it a ghost, or outside influences with ulterior motives?

I genuinely feel bad pouring some scorn on this TV movie, because I so wanted to like it, to grasp a bit of freshness in what has become known as the Gaslight sub-genre of horror. Sadly it's just not very good. It's awash with soap opera operatics, some very poor acting, a confused tonal flow (am I mystery, horror, a message thriller?), an out of place porn movie jazz like musical score, and an ending that beggars belief. The mansion design is great, and there's some nice night time photography during the outer grounds sequences, but it's a difficult film to recommend to those after a good old fashioned mansion based spooker. 5/10

This is a TV movie thriller masquerading as a ghost story, and it's as dim as it sounds. It encapsulates everything terrible about the American TV movie genre of the 1990s (although it narrowly missed that decade by a year): horrible scripting, a lack of decent characters, routine acting, and a storyline that thinks its something special when in actual fact it isn't.

THE HAUNTING OF SARAH HARDY attempts to build a decent Gothic atmosphere along the line of Du Maurier's REBECCA but attempts at building suspense are destined for failure. Instead, this becomes a piece of strictly routine hokum, with characters supposedly sent out of their wits by mysterious hauntings and spooky goings-on. The main issue I had was with the predictability of the storyline, which meant I knew exactly what was going on and guessed the twist well in advance. That makes for a very boring viewing experience.

There are no actors of note in the production, just the kind of faces that appear in this particular genre and never anything else. The lead, Sela Ward, would go on to appear in the horror remake of THE STEPFATHER some 20 years later, seemingly not having aged in the meantime, but given her lacklustre acting on show here you wonder how she ever had a career in the first place.

Well, what starts out as a suicide story, which is tragic, and possibly the best part of the movie even though it was a bit sad for me, the rest wasn't all that scary nor interesting, I mean it lacked a lot of frightening scenes and was a bit dated, though the scenes of the dead mother was a little scary, especially the phone call which reminded me of Psycho, but still, the rest of the film was not exciting at all, and the ending itself was empty, it wasn't shocking at all, maybe a bit surprising, but not in a good way, it makes you just pause then say a simple "okaaay", that's it, it's done, zip, nada, nothing, the acting okay, and the lead actress was good. Overall not very good at all.

I remember this as one of the first great mystery films that I saw as a child. My parents only let me watch it because Alan's office and Ms. Stepford's kitchen were both located in my family home in Oregon. We still tell the tale of Sela Ward volunteering to babysit my baby brother while Mom drove the three of us girls to elementary school.

Not until I saw The Others have I seen a movie that makes me second-guess myself so much. I love Sela's acting, even if the writing would not have impressed me as an adult.

It also reminds me of What Lies Beneath, the conspiracy of one character who may not believe in supernatural influences preying on the credulous for their own gains.