This movie can better be found under the title "Full Circle". First and foremost, it must be put into perfect perspective: it was released years AFTER the blockbuster "The Exorcist". Such perspective should provide the reasonable expectation of suspense and supernatural horror, and this movie falls so far short as to have deserved the shelving it got -- those reviews that hail it as great and thankfully resurrected from the vaults of overlooked films are off base, because this movie deserved to have been forgotten. Why? First and foremost is the painfully sluggish pace, as it moves so slowly as to border on absolute boredom and disinterest. Second, the unexplainably disengaged characters, most of whom are dispatched (as in killed) with unexplained relationship to, and peculiarly disconnected from the opening sequence and start of the movie. Third, there is really nothing frightening in the movie, just oddity at best. I wasn't scared once, not even once. The brilliant actor Keir Dullea was relegated to a character of no importance and so was completely wasted in this film. Then there is the element of story/script credibility, which comes into question when a character is killed in unoccupied house, after which days and weeks go by with no discerned stench of the dead body. Frightening? Hah! Far from it, and the ending was ultimately anti-climactic, and thereby unsatisfying.
Review of The Haunting of Julia
