True-Crime Schlock: Tacky, ghoulishly exploitative "Haunting of Sharon Tate" plays like a spoof of a Lifetime movie

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019)

94 min.

Release Date: April 5, 2019 (Limited & VOD)

Based on the real events of the brutal murders of Sharon Tate and her friends at the hands of the Manson Family, “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” is about as real and insightful as a National Enquirer headline. Written and directed by Daniel Farrands (2018’s “The Amityville Murders”), the film is exactly the fraudulent, sensationalized true-crime docudrama that it should have never been, making a mockery of a tragic real-life crime. Speculative to the point that it presents a few too many wrongheaded creative decisions too close for comfort, the film purports that Sharon had a prophetic dream a year prior of her and her friends being murdered; therefore, the viewer must sit through the murders more than once in her dream before the forgone conclusion. Tacky and ghoulishly exploitative, “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” keeps deluding itself into thinking that it's paying respect or offering profundity when it’s just distastefully capitalizing on the tragedy.

In the days leading up to August 9, 1969, glamorous actress Sharon Tate Polanski (played by Hilary Duff), eight and a half months pregnant with husband Roman Polanski’s baby, returns from London to her hilltop Los Angeles home on Cielo Drive with hairstylist friend Jay Sebring (Jonathan Bennett). While Sharon was gone, aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski (Pawel Szajda) and coffee heiress Abigail Folger (Lydia Hearst) have been staying there and looking after the place, and unbeknownst to Sharon, they received letters from a man named “Charlie.” After her dog is found dead, Sharon begins to have paranoid delusions that people are after her, and she happens to be right as Charles Manson’s followers get onto the property and paint “PIG” in blood on the windows.

Teen-dream actress Hilary Duff tries her damnedest, playing dress-up and mostly doing an ethereal impression of Sharon Tate before acting frazzled and frightened, but that’s more than what can be said about her fellow castmates, who are wooden and out of their depth. The dialogue is ham-fisted and on-the-nose when Sharon poses the question to her friends about how simple decisions affect the outcome of our lives and how she’s a slave to her destiny, or when Sharon asks if she will live a long and happy life when playing the talking board game Ka-Bala. Whether it was budgetary limitations or not, director Daniel Farrands can’t really sell the period detail, making it look like a film that was shot over the course of a long weekend. Considering Farrands pulls double-duty in writing and directing the film, all of the blame should be placed on him and his superficial, problematic script.

Virtually a reenactment that plays fast and loose with the truth but then strangely uses real-life footage of Sharon and Roman's nuptials, “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” plays like a spoof of a Lifetime movie with a lot more blood and eardrum-splitting musical stings to punctuate every non-scare. The film does finally ratchet up some tension during the final twenty minutes or so, but it’s far too little, too late, and it’s never as tense and claustrophobic as 2016’s slicker, better-acted “Wolves at the Door,” which depicted the same story. As much as one can assume that Daniel Farrands wanted to respect the deceased and the families of the deceased, treating the story as the tragedy that it was, the way in which he tells it is manipulative, free of insight, and pointlessly revisionary as he attempts at a fake-out with a hopeful, fate-altering outcome. Sharon Tate and her friends deserved a more dignified and nuanced treatment than the shockingly misguided one served up here that leaves a gross aftertaste.

Grade: D