Summary
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is a tasteless movie that uses the tragic events of the Sharon Tate murders for entertainment purposes.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is from director Daniel Farrands (The Amityville Murders) starring Hilary Duff (Lizzie McGuire), Jonathan Bennett (The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time) and Lydia Hearst (Z Nation), this is a horror thriller based on the visions that plagued the pregnant late actress Sharon Tate before her murder at the hands of the Manson Family.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate follows the events leading up to the shocking murder of Sharon Tate and her friends by the Manson Family. We see how Sharon Tate (Duff) returns home to have her baby, joined by her friends Jay Sebring (Bennett), Abigail Folger (Hearst) and Wojciech Frykowski (Szajda), waiting for her husband Roman Polanski to return from his latest project. We only follow the three days before the murders, as Sharon learns about the visits of the Manson Family and becomes paranoid that there is danger coming her way when it comes to the vision she is experiencing through her dreams.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate uses the story of Sharon Tate’s murder to present us a story using the ideas she had visions (which she did once) about violent crimes happening to her and her friends, to try to make us believe she foresaw the murders that happened to her and her friend at the hands of the Manson Family. This is easily one of the weakest attempts of bringing us a home invasion story; it is hard to complain about the character though because they are real victims, but the characters we get introduced to just don’t get to show anything about them. It could easily be broken down to Sharon Tate, big known actress, with male friend, female friend, and random stylist. This shouldn’t be what we are seeing because these are real people that had real lives before what happened to them.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate has performances from Disney teen star Hilary Duff that explains why she hasn’t gone onto have an adult acting career; she can’t handle horror, she barely looks scared for the most part, while the supporting cast just doesn’t seem to know they are in a film.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is filled with the horror genre, using the idea of home invasion which is one of the more interesting ones because we have had great ones like The Strangers, Intruders and Don’t Breathe; those films are fictional, which is why the home invasion sub-genre works. Basing such a film on a real-life crime just doesn’t work. We do go through the idea of the visions through dreams, which show most of the horror involved in the film.
Overall The Haunting of Sharon Tate is one of the horror films that is being thrown out to use the real-life crimes of Charles Manson and his family to jump on the ideas that it could make something of nothing and we all know that Quentin Tarantino is doing his own version of this murder with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
