Movie Review: The Haunting of Sharon Tate

The Haunting of Sharon Tate no stars / *****

Directed by: Daniel Farrands.

Written by: Daniel Farrands.

Starring: Hilary Duff (Sharon Tate), Jonathan Bennett (Jay Sebring), Lydia Hearst (Abigail Folger), Pawel Szajda (Wojciech Frykowski), Ryan Cargill (Steven Parent), Bella Popa (Sadie), Fivel Stewart (Yellow), Tyler Johnson (Tex Watson), Ben Mellish (Charles Manson).

 

I imagine the reason why The Haunting of Sharon Tate got made was because Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also coming out this year, which in part is about the Manson murders, which has its 50^th Anniversary this year. The film is basically the worst case scenario of what Tarantino’s film may look like if he were to do something similar to what he did in both Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, which is to rewrite horrific times in history as a revenge thriller – an alternate history of how things could have turned out. And yet, I think there is a difference between alternate history, and what Daniel Farrands and company have done with The Haunting of Sharon Tate. While Inglorious Basterds used fictional characters – fictional Jewish families, fictional Nazis, etc. (with a real people thrown in at the sides), Daniel Farrands have used real people, in a real situation. There is a difference between Tarantino’s Shosanna exacting revenge on the Nazis, and what happens here. It would be as if in Tarantino’s film, he had made a film in which Anne Frank and those in the attic become kick ass Nazi killers. One is a legitimate use of alternate history, the other is just gross exploitation. And that is what The Haunting of Sharon Tate is.

 

The movie uses a supposed quote by Tate, a year before the murders, where she foretold her own murders (the sourcing of that quote is highly dubious to begin with) to essentially make this film’s version Tate (played, in an awful performance, by Hilary Duff) into some kind of psychic, receiving premonitions of the upcoming murders. The first half of the movie sees Tate as a woman who is uncomfortable in her own home – lashing out at the people who were staying there for her as she and her husband (an unseen Roman Polanski) were away. The film doesn’t quite blame victims Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski for the murders, but it doesn’t not blame them either. Tate is haunted by visions of people breaking into her home, upset that a strange man named Charlie keeps stopping by to talk to the former resident of the home. A tape – playing an actual Charles Manson written song – just starts playing one night. Her beloved dog runs off and is later found horrifically murdered. A walk in the Hollywood Hills turns creepy when two young women seemingly stalk Tate and Folger. None of this – as far as I can tell – is based on anything other than that dubious quote a year before the murders from Tate where she had a bad dream.

 

With about 45 minutes left in the movie, the Manson family members invade the home – and in the audience you prepare yourself for what you think may be an extended bloodbath. But Farrands actually dispatches with the murders – the way we know them – fairly quickly. He then circles back – with Tate waking up in the middle of the night as if it had been a dream. She spends the next day increasingly paranoid about what is going to happen that night – and when the Manson family comes back and attacks them again, this time they are ready. The five victims are able to band together, and fight off the attackers – ending with this version of Tate looking at the dead bodies of herself and the other victims, as if in another dimension.

 

There are lots of things you could pick apart here. The historical inaccuracies here are a lot – it leaves out the caretaker in the back trailer who survived the attacks altogether, as if he didn’t exist. It does the same thing to the other Manson girl who was along for the ride, and saw everything, but didn’t participate but who became the star witness. Poof, they aren’t there, because, of course, it doesn’t really fit the narrative. Pretty much everything in the first half of the movie is just completely made up. There are more – a lot more – things that don’t match the historical record. And that is the least of the problems with the movie.

 

The acting is terrible. I don’t know what Duff is trying to do with her accent – she is trying to match Tate’s somewhat strange high class little accent, but doesn’t get it right, and just sounds strange. But at least she seems to be trying to do something. The rest of the cast basically seems bored, and are going through the motions. The dialogue is laughably bad. The direction is horrible – trying to scare the audience with a bunch of cheap jump scares. The whole movie has the look and feel of a cheap made for TV movie.

 

But my biggest problem with the movie is really what it implies about the victims here. That they brought it on themselves, that if only they had fought back, they could have survived. It’s an offensive reframing of history, treating the Manson murders as a cheap entertainment, and then blaming the victims for their own demise. Turning the whole thing into a kind of supernatural home invasion thriller. Tarantino has been criticized for the way he handled Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained – not unfairly, but not in a way I agree with either. But he didn’t approach things like this. And I do not believe he will do it in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – but we shall see. But no matter what, I don’t believe it is possible for him to make a worse film than The Haunting of Sharon Tate – or anyone else this year for that matter. As for Farrands, I don’t think he’s learned anything. His next film is called The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.