I’m not usually one of those guys that complains about false advertising, but if your movie has the word “Haunting” in the title, then a haunting is what I expect to see. Worse still is that I don’t know what it is I saw in The Haunting of Molly Hartley, but it wasn’t anything tangible, believable or understandable. Lead by a cast of pretty young things that don’t offer much in the way of character develop, the film is forced to rely on mystery elements that make no sense, and a bunch of scares that aren’t really that scary (assuming you discount the crazy, religious chick, of course).

Perhaps seeing Molly Hartley would be different without having first sat through recent “horrors” The Unborn and The Uninvited. This story deals with a high school senior with the initials M.H. and how she’s struggles to return to some sense of normalcy after recovering from an attempted stabbing murder committed by her own mother. Molly (played by Haley Bennett) connects with the sweet religious girl (Shanna Collins), the delinquent hellion (Shannon Marie Woodward), the pretty, rich boy (Chace Crawford) and his bitchy, sort-of ex-girlfriend (AnnaLynne McCord). But for poor Molly, and her over-protective dad (Medium’s over-protective husband Jake Weber), the demons aren’t figurative; they’re quite real.

And what are those demons? Well, the literal ones of course. Actually, we’re talking about the Mr. Big of demons. No, that’s a lie, because the Devil is never really mentioned. It’s always, “they” want her, and “they” are after her. The mystery is that Molly parent’s saved her from dying in still-birth by making a deal with a mysterious woman that later turns out to be the guidance councillor at Molly’s new school. There, I just saved you about 90 minutes of spinning wheels in the mud that the filmmakers affectionately referred to as “character development” in production. I admit though, that could be unfair because, to the discerning viewer, it may seems as if that a lot was left on the cutting room floor. So the film feels perfectly justified to jump around from point to point without filling in the blanks.

But at least we have some terrible, terrible acting to take our worries off the fact that the title and the plot make little to no sense. Crawford, who’s the least interesting person on the TV series Gossip Girl, plays the least convincing member of an evil cult ever. He’s dull, dull, dull and dull and it really makes you wonder why McCord’s character would get so catty about keeping him, or why Molly, who simply by the fact that she was attempted murdered by her own mother, is infinitely more interesting than this walking GAP ad. And could Nina Siemaszko, who plays the guidance councillor, have been more suspicious? Practically from the minute she shows up you’re like “oh, she’s evil.” Basically, it’s all very boring with no spontaneity, which is one element that ordinarily makes for a believable performance.

And when you’re movie has issues with believability, you know you’ve got a problem with the fundamentals. Unless the deleted bits offer some kind of insight into what the filmmakers were trying to do, then I really can’t see a reason why anyone thought this movie would be good enough to dump millions of dollars in. It’s not smart, it’s not scary, and it’s not sexy. What it is though is prosaic, pedantic and shallow, but mostly it’s just sterile. Why should I care about these characters? Worry about their plight and their fate? In the finally tally, it reminded me of the 90s film Disturbing Behaviour about an evil shrink turning deviant high schoolers into Stepford teens: a good idea in principle, but terrible in execution. See this with someone that hates good storytelling.