In the days leading to her murder, actress Sharon Tate begins having
nightmarish premonitions.
Directed by: Daniel Farrands
Starring: Hilary Duff, Jonathan Bennett, Lydia
Hearst, Pawel Szajda, Ryan Cargill
2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the infamous Manson murders, so
it's no surprise that we received a bunch of films related to the killings.
Among them were American Psycho director Mary Harron's
Charlie Says, with Matt Smith as Charles Manson, and
Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Margot Robbie portraying Manson's most famous victim, actress Sharon
Tate, then wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski. We also got writer/director
Daniel Farrands' The Haunting of Sharon Tate.
Former child star Hilary Duff takes on the role of Tate for this
decidedly distasteful take on the final days of the actress's sadly short
life. With her husband working in London, the eight months pregnant Tate
returns to the couple's home in the Hollywood hills with several hangers on
for company. In a horribly written scene in which every character
conveniently spells out just exactly who they are, we meet Tate's one-time
lover turned stylist Jay Sebring (Jonathan Bennett), Polanski's
buddy Wojciech Frykowski (Pawel Szajda) and his lover, coffee
heiress Abigail Folger (Lydia Hearst, herself a member of a famous
American dynasty).
Tate begins having nightmarish visions of the killings of herself and her
friends, who brush off her hysteria. The actress's paranoia is heightened by
the strangers who persistently call at the house looking for its previous
owner, record producer Terry Melcher. A shaggy haired, bearded hippy keeps
leaving demo tapes at the house in envelopes labelled 'Charlie'. When Tate
plays one of the recordings with the aid of nerdy young caretaker Steven
Parent (Ryan Cargill), she is further disturbed by a subliminal
message, which when played backwards is revealed as the sound of Manson
repeating the phrase 'Helter Skelter'.
Fans of
the Halloween franchise
will recognise Farrands as the writer of the troubled 1995 instalment
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I remember at the time reading various interviews with Farrands, who
clearly came across as a fan of the series, which made the butchered version
of his script that ultimately hit screens all the more disappointing. From
his direction of The Haunting of Sharon Tate, it's clear Farrands is desperate to make his own Halloween
movie. The Manson 'family' members are framed exactly like Michael Myers as
they stalk and stakeout Tate's home, and the climactic home invasion boasts
a couple of shots that are straight out of John Carpenter's film. Farrands
even opens his film with the same Edgar Allen Poe quote that opens
Carpenter's The Fog.
Farrands doesn't do a bad job of directing here. There's a degree of
tension, though it's difficult to ascertain whether that's down to Farrands'
work or simply due to our familiarity with how this all eventually pans out.
His script however, is atrocious. Nobody has a single realistic
conversation, with every dialogue exchange existing merely to fill in plot
details. Duff is miscast; not only does she look nothing like Tate, but her
portrayal of a woman fearing for her life and that of her unborn child is
more befitting that of a stressed homeowner struggling to deal with a
troublesome plumbing scenario.
The idea of turning a real life tragedy into a thriller with supernatural
elements is as bad taste as it gets, but in Farrands' defence, his heart
does seem to be in the right place. I won't spoil anything, but Farrands
pulls a similar trick here to the one Tarantino pulled with his own take on
this dark chapter of Hollywood history. Farrands plainly has a lot of
sympathy for Tate, and his film is an odd case of a filmmaker attempting to
rescue a real-life victim and rewrite the past. Noble, perhaps, but the
general shoddy execution of his film does this concept no favours.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is on
Prime Video UK now.
