But in a more perfect world, we wouldn't have the remake fall into the hands of producer Paula Hart and her actress-director daughter, Melissa Joan Hart, who spent a busy childhood as the TV star of "Clarissa Explains It All" and "Sabrina The Teenage Witch".......
Nor would we imagine them making the film as a quick. cheap Lifetime Channel Movie.....which translates to 85 minutes of footage jammed in between 35 minutes worth of commercials.......
To their credit (or let's just say to their common sense), team Hart wisely decided to jettison the mind-boggling dollop of science fiction in the source material, a novel by Florence Engel Randall. Disney famously hit a creative wall in their hapless attempts at replicating a creature from another dimension, along with its bizarre habitat
Melissa explains it all in her version by simplifying the story to a simple, easy-to-digest ghost tale, requiring minimal special effects. (And if you're shooting a made-for-TV movie for a basic cable network, "minimal" becomes your first, middle and last names....)
That brings us to the bad stuff........the film suffers badly in comparison to the slick professionalism of the Disney original. It's weighed down by all the usual maladies of cable movies.......pacing so slow, it comes close to still life portraiture, flat, uninspired acting and an overall look of "let's shoot the damn thing and go home and watch TV".......
The film does score something of a coup in getting Angelica Huston to assume the Bette Davis role of the mysterious, vaguely sinister old matron pining for her vanished daughter. Huston gives good icy stares, but she couldn't possibly duplicate the classic creepiness that the aged, raspy-voiced Davis brought to the role, just by her very presence.
We'll take a less than wild guess and predict a more appreciative audience of slumber party teen girls when the film arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray, mercifully shorn of 87 commercials for lip gloss. (For that new generation, director Hart follows the directives of today's horror filmmakers who treat their audience like experimental lab animals......jump scares every seven minutes)
As for us, we'll scare up 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)......BQ recommends you stick with the Disney.....with all its flaws and missteps, it's still a real movie-movie......
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