Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When I see ‘based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe’ attached to a film, I can’t be the only person who goes through a few different emotions. Ditto ‘based on a story by HP Lovecraft’, actually, as each writer has had such a mixed history in film – when they’re good, they’re very very good, and when they’re bad… Still, I’m always on the look-out for interesting adaptations of Poe’s stories, so my first feeling is usually pleased, then a bit more reserved, and then finally I find myself saying over and over, ‘Please don’t mess this up’.

Poe is always appealing to filmmakers, but it hasn’t always proved so easy to transmit his strange aesthetics, warped protagonists and yeah, sickly humour to the screen. It was gratifying, though, to see that the director attached to Stonehearst Asylum, Brad Anderson, was the guy who directed The Machinist ten years previously – a film whose tortured lead character wouldn’t have gone amiss in a premature burial or undergoing the agonies of the Spanish Inquisition. Hell, he already had the persecution mania and the mental debility, so he was most of the way there. Anderson has some good pedigree as a TV director, too, so with his prior experience and a strong, high-profile cast – with the decent budget to match, I’d bet – the pieces were in place for a worthwhile watch. The resulting film is undeniably well made; it looks glossy, the locations are excellent (though clearly not shot in England where it’s set!) and by and large, the performances are decent. So why does this film fall short of the mark?

The plot is as follows: we’re taken to a post-Poe era, but a very interesting one considering the subject matter of the screenplay – 1899, where we start by witnessing a demonstrative lecture on female hysteria for the benefit of trainee ‘alienists’, a term which used to mean doctors specialising in insanity. (The first alienist we encounter here, by the way, is Brendan Gleeson, and it’s bloody criminal that he only gets what amounts to a cameo in the film, as he’s one of the best things in it.) One of the newly-qualified doctors, an Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) wants to make a career in alienism, so to further his clinical experience, he travels to the imposing Stonehearst Asylum. He’s met there by an equally imposing and unfriendly bunch, but once they identify that he’s in earnest, they invite him to stay, with the superintendent Dr. Lamb taking him under his wing. Incidentally, Ben Kingsley (Lamb) must like the feel of the white coat, because he played a very similar role to this in Shutter Island…

Dr. Lamb introduces Dr. Newgate to the unorthodox system of care at the asylum: no one is confined to their rooms, and they can entertain themselves as they see fit. This, Lamb believes, will help the inmates to find happiness, though he accepts that this isn’t so much a cure as containment. It’s progressive, yes, but a bit hopeless too. Newgate is guarded in accepting all of this, but he agrees to work with Lamb, and begins to interact with the patients. One who really catches his eye is a Mrs. Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), the woman we saw at the beginning in a ‘hysteric fit’ (this seemed to be a catch-all diagnosis in the Victorian era for any woman using her body for purposes beyond pliantly knitting or giving birth). She certainly seems calm enough now, though, and ethics be damned – Dr. Newgate soon takes a bit of a shine to our Eliza. She’s not so sure, herself, and begs him to leave, leave! Bloody hysterics. Confused, Dr. Newgate wants to know why she would be so keen to send him away; well, he soon discovers exactly why, and it seems that the civilised facade of the asylum is just that – a facade.

So far, so serious: perhaps in keeping with the darkly-comic Poe story used as the basis for this screenplay (‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’) it seems in certain places like we’re encouraged to giggle at the patients – like the man who thinks he’s a racehorse, for instance – but when the lead actors are on screen, the film mostly sheds any ironic or comedic aspects. Kingsley and Sturgess discuss treatments, and do their rounds, and talk shop. Equally serious is Michael Caine, turning on one of the strongest performances here, though again – somewhat frustratingly – in little more than a cameo role, although he does at least contribute to the film’s first ‘big twist’. And then there’s Kate Beckinsale, who’s front-and-centre in the publicity material, but spends rather less time on-screen than you may expect, particularly given that ‘Eliza Graves’ was the film’s original title. She’s…she’s not exactly in her element here, enacting every emotional state the script demands by simply being breathy and open-mouthed; it’s a lesser case of Keira Knightley Jaw, that absurd bloody pout that no one did back then. It doesn’t half mitigate her believability.

As for the aesthetics of the film, which ought to be bang on for such a well-documented era that overlapped with the burgeoning age of photography and film and in whose houses we often still live – well, it starts reasonably strong, but very quickly I began to see a kind of picturesque, sanitised Victoriana creeping in. At first, the imposing location for Stonehearst looks good; get indoors, though, and it’s all too neat and clean, more Arkham Asylum for gamers than House of Usher. It just needs more gloom and rot – or, it needs to go fully in the other direction and embrace a sort of lurid, Corman-style colour palette and OTT stylistics. ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’ was originally adapted as a Grand Guignol performance in Paris: that says it all for me. There’s little of that approach here. The vision we get of an insane asylum is altogether just too cosy, quaint and accessible, which – together with the actually very tame, Certificate 15 adult content – keeps any real horror at bay. Furthermore, there’s ample missed opportunity here to really pass comment on the barbarism inflicted against mental health patients during the era; we’re not really asked to think about it in too great a depth. Some questions are raised in the script, sure, and the question of ‘what constitutes a lunatic’ pops up, but ultimately treatments are invoked simply to add more drama, not because we’re meant to fully engage with the plight of the characters.

I think it’s such a shame that Stonehearst Asylum isn’t a far better film than it is. It’s an okay film. It’s pretty easy on the eye, and it has some decent performances. But given a bit more sparkle, a bit more atmosphere, it could have been great. Unfortunately, it’s far too much in the ‘mild peril’ category; pretty, yeah, but too light-touch, and as such any real links to the sardonic energy of Poe are few and far-between.

Stonehearst Asylum is out in DVD and Blu-ray on 22nd June 2015. Trailer contains spoilers.

By Keri O’Shea

Do you believe in ghosts? Personally, I don’t, but I don’t think it’s any less of a big deal to acknowledge the incredible interplay between human imagination and perceived phenomena which gives rise to tales of ghostly goings-on. It doesn’t strip the magic out of it, for me, to suggest that electromagnetic sensitivity (for instance) can have a metaphysical impact on people; hey, the effects are no less important and no less terrifying, when it comes down to it. Like many sceptics, though, I’ve made a life’s habit of seeking out ghost stories, and supernatural horror is one of my favourite things. But why? Well, perhaps beyond the fact of these being some damn good stories, and the part of me that quite likes being scared within the safe-space of horror, part of me wants to be challenged. Not to quote a certain 90s TV show or anything, perhaps to an extent “I want to believe”, hence I’m so happy to pore over alleged ‘real life’ hauntings, wondering at how seemingly average folk can apparently find themselves under siege by something which doesn’t seem to operate according to any known laws. I may come out and dismiss what I’ve read, but still, by the next time it’s like a moth to a flame all over again.

This brings us to the series of phenomena occurring between 1977 and 1979 in an ordinary terraced house in Enfield, England; phenomena which seemed to focus chiefly on the eleven year old daughter of the family, Janet. Now known chiefly as the ‘Enfield poltergeist’ haunting, during this time the family heard ghostly rappings, were pelted by objects, and Janet bore the brunt of what seemed to be physical attacks before beginning to channel ‘voices’ of the dead. I first read an account of all of this is a compendium of ‘The Unexplained’ belonging to my grandmother: The Unexplained was divided up into chapters, with one for UFOs, one for Divination, and so on – until the chapter on Poltergeists, those ‘mischievous spirits’ associated with notorious cases worldwide – the Bell Witch, the Matthew Manning story, Borley Rectory. I remember feeling a tad underwhelmed by the photos of Janet ostensibly being flung across the room (had she been upside down instead of clearly springing into space, that would have really been something) but the finer details of the story were definitely intriguing. How far were Janet, and to a lesser extent her older sister, responsible for what was going on? Was there really some malignant entity perpetrating some of the phenomena in the house? And why were so many ordinarily po-faced adults so willing to go on record to say that they had witnessed the phenomena take place?

Looking into the case again, having just watched the enjoyable recent three-part series The Enfield Haunting and had my interest in the case rekindled, it seems to me that the real story in Enfield was an incredibly tangled, convoluted combination of elements: childhood trauma (the children’s father had walked out on them), adolescence, related adolescent attention seeking, credibility, group hysteria, various kinds of suggestibility, ulterior motives – and maybe, just maybe, a nub of something genuinely inexplicable, which gave rise to all of the above. The great thing about The Enfield Haunting is that it plays with several of these possibilities. Although of course giving credence to the events as recorded at the time, as well as adding extra elements to them (it wouldn’t be much of a supernatural story, in terms of entertainment, if it didn’t) it also takes a step back on occasion, and allows us to see children acting up to what was expected of ‘the poltergeist’, deliberately faking phenomena for effect. These moments keep you hovering as an audience member, because it reminds you that the ‘real life events’ (which are almost routinely vaunted at the beginning of any new horror yarn on-screen) are far from cut-and-dried here. You’re encouraged to question, as well as to immerse yourself in what is being presented.

Framed from the point of view of paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall), the larger-than-life real life character is played rather quieter here, with Grosse a man broken by the death of his daughter and evidently searching for tangible proof of the afterlife. He finds this in Enfield, when he picks up on the media buzz surrounding the alleged haunting (Mrs. Hodgson had called in the Daily Mirror newspaper as a first port-of-call when the haunting began). Soon installing himself in the family home alongside fellow investigator Guy Playfair (Matthew MacFadyen), Grosse forges a close relationship with the spirited, impertinent Janet (played brilliantly by Eleanor Worthington-Cox) but being a clever girl, Janet does manipulate Grosse: she’s depicted on several occasions as a rather needy pre-teen who has bottled up a lot of rage about her current circumstances, and enjoys the attention bestowed upon her. Maurice and Janet become rather symbiotic, each needing the other, with the phenomena increasing the more oblique encouragement Janet receives from the adults in her life. There does seem to have been an element of this in the original case, and it’s a credit to the series for debating the effects of this here. However, we are also shown a multitude of events from Janet’s point-of-view, which would imply that she isn’t simply faking what happens when she needs to do so: it’s no sober debunking, this series, and in fact it adds several elements to the story for the purposes of building some very effective dread.

The story diverges from the 70s case by becoming more of an investigation narrative; developing claims made by the real Janet that she was speaking for one entity in particular – an old man called Bill – we see psychic mediums, seances and detective work employed to find out who he is, what he wants and how to get rid of him. Some of the sequences involving The Enfield Haunting’s ‘Joe’ (with regards the name change, this is probably to break any links between the work of fiction and the very real former inhabitant of the Hodgson family home whom Janet allegedly channeled) are truly horrific – even if they move more towards Hollywood scares than the more understated style scenes. Where Janet plays with her sister Margaret’s View-Finder toy and sees the old man creep up on her via the pictures she’s looking at – well, it may resonate with Stephen King’s It to an extent, but it’s still bloody effective. Likewise, some of the more flashy, higher-action scenes are more derivative of the body of work which came before the new series, but they’re nicely handled here, and really drew me in. I wonder if some of the impact comes from the odd recognisability of the Hodgson home; I can remember a lot of the styles of furniture from my own home growing up, and even recognised a few pieces wholesale. I’ve definitely crept into very similar-looking rooms as a child, as equally petrified as Janet of whatever might be lurking in the dark there, and perhaps this evocative touch makes the series all the more successful for people of a similar age. And doesn’t that tie in with what many of us want from supernatural horror – to feel the type of enervating scares we felt as kids?

Doing a good job of honouring the source material whilst going somewhere new with it, not dwelling for too long on mainstream horror cliche, The Enfield Haunting balances a story of the effects of bereavement alongside its more visceral scares. Neither thing feels compromised by the other, and the end result definitely makes for engaging telly. Add to this an excellent and plausible cast, and this leads me to hope that more like this series may be on the way.

By Keri O’Shea

Can it really be five years since Dream Home first graced our screens? Bloody hell. It seems incredible that one of the biggest hits of the festival circuit of the year of its release and a big success with many horror film fans has had to wait until now to make it out on Blu-ray. Well, ours not to question why (actually that’s bollocks – we’re always questioning why) and it’s here now, at least. It’s interesting, though: I haven’t revisited the film at all in the intervening years since I first saw it – meaning that, apart from anything else, fairly inevitably a few of the plot details had become lost to the mists of time – but I think seeing Dream Home outside of the festival experience at last has allowed me to look at it with a more sober eye. When I saw the film for the first time, I was blown away by the incredibly visceral gore, a raft of high production values and a genuinely unique rationale for the violence on offer – meaning it made one of my films of the year. Whilst all of those things are still there of course, it’s a lot clearer to me now that Dream Home is tonally rather odd. The film juggles pathos with overkill, commenting on very real social issues but doing it with a level of grue that’s sometimes arduous, and sometimes humorous. I’m not sure if ‘splatter satire’ was particularly a thing before Dream Home, but it certainly feels like it was the first to do anything quite like this.

Via a reasonably complex time frame which goes from minutes-and-seconds precision to time lapse and a back-story which encompasses many years, we meet our main character Sheung (Josie Ho), a young woman who may appear to be upwardly-mobile, but who struggles considerably to keep her head above water in Hong Kong’s brutal financial climate (which the film is very happy to make clear to foreign viewers, explaining the great disparity between average earnings and property prices). Working two jobs to help her save up for a deposit on a property, we’re gradually introduced to the reasons why she’s so hellbent on owning an apartment in one area of the city in particular; we see Sheung’s life as a rather bleak trudge through drudgery and anonymity, peopled by those who don’t care and largely don’t matter, and via flashback we see that it’s been this way for a significant share of her life so far. However, it’s some time before we’re permitted to fully join the dots, and see just why this young woman is on a murderous ascent through the apartment block she would like to call home.

Despite the great pains which director and writer Ho-Cheung Pang takes with the characterisation of Sheung, crafting a fairly complex contextualisation for her behaviour at the film’s most up-to-date point, she remains a challenging prospect, and I found this was more the case with today’s viewing than with the last, where I rather more happily accepted that there was method to her madness. Yes, she’s a young woman who has been pushed to the brink by circumstance, and Josie Ho does sterling work here in many respects, but there are aspects to Sheung that I find hard to get past, on reflection: perhaps that’s the point, and you’re meant to see her more as a symbol of the sort of blinkered materialism which drives people down certain incomprehensible paths (though perhaps not to this extreme!) than as some sort of beleaguered Everyman character who just can’t help it as a victim of circumstance, but as characters go she’s not easy to empathise with, all told. Step aside from the bad murders, even, and you’re still left with a lousy daughter (oh come on), a lacklustre mistress, someone who’s selfish, even squeamish, and to state the fucking obvious, deeply flawed. Still, maybe this is less about Sheung and more about everyone else: there are no likeable people in Ho-Cheung Pang’s modern vista of Hong Kong. Everyone we meet has some sort of agenda; everyone is out for themselves, either behaving connivingly, indolently or hopelessly, or accepting of all the above in spades. This is a very bleak film indeed.

Knowing all of that, though, perhaps makes it harder to accept the fact that the film takes some serious risks with its tone. In some places, especially when dealing with the young Sheung in her childhood, the plot feels almost saccharin: not all of the justification for her unshakeable adult stance on a sea-front view is convincing. Similarly, skip forward to the night of violence at the apartment block, and the film prevaricates, not sure whether it wants to plump for the more challenging, ‘torture porn’ style killings (hey, I don’t like the term either but you at least know what I mean by it) or a more grim, cartoonish type of splatter, with a few of the murders moving from the sublime well into the ridiculous, with one of the victims even sending himself up a bit. It can all feel a little schizophrenic, and maybe tried to do too much within one movie.

Still, it sounds for all the world like I really didn’t enjoy my second viewing of Dream Home…but I did, really, newly-found misgivings or otherwise. For all of her unlikeable traits, Sheung remains a compelling and original character throughout, and her own disbelief that she’s doing what she’s doing definitely adds an engaging note to the plot. It’s here that we closest approach caring for her. And although it’s not approached all in one way or another, either deadly serious or played for kicks, Dream Home does have a very real set of concerns at its core, with its particular telling of the long-term effects of slum clearance and rising city prices certainly making for a hard-hitting, innovative horror film. Sure, everything is blown up to grotesque proportions (that’s what monsters are for) but that fits in well with the film’s opening assertion that in a crazy city ‘one has to be crazier’. The film still looks incredible, too, with its colours and long shots really popping off the screen in the new, polished format. If you haven’t yet seen Dream Home, this is definitely the way to go.

We’ll say nothing of the fact that the distributors, in their wisdom, have included cover ratings from two defunct and let’s say, problematic print magazines (Nuts and Gorezone!) – in this case, this is still a worthy disc to add to the collection.

Dream Home is available via Network from 25th May 2015.

By Keri O’Shea

Japan, 1960s: a young man by the name of Jiro ( the effortlessly cool Akira Kobayashi) has just been released after eight years in the big house. No sooner has he walked through the gates, but an approaching man curtly reminds him that, as Jiro was implicated in the death of his younger brother, he needs to watch himself. That’s the kind of world into which Jiro has just emerged – a world of yakuza, of threats and vendettas, but it’s the world he knows, and so he returns back to his ‘family’, the Ichimonji clan.

To his dismay, he arrives to find a clan in disarray. The godfather of the clan is elderly, frail and sick (and I’ll confess at this stage that I have no idea of yakuza terminology is this close to mafia terminology or if something has very definitely been lost in translation somewhere along the way) whilst many of the men, seeing him in this precarious state, have gone about their business elsewhere. It’s clear that there is not much of a family of which to speak here – and Jiro needs to find work, so when he’s offered a chance by the once-rival Hazama clan at running the nearby boom town of Takagawa, he cautiously accepts.

This being a yakuza movie, however, it’s soon clear that Jiro’s new position has thrown him into a precarious situation. To consolidate the Hazama position, there will be many rivals to deal with – many of whom are interested in controlling Takagawa because there’s ready money to be made, thanks to the wealth of surrounding farmland that’s just waiting to be taken from all the terrified farmers who still live and work there. The Aoba gang, essentially a troupe of unprincipled thugs, prove themselves happy to bludgeon and intimidate their way towards their goals; their big rivals, the Tono gang, are sharper-dressed and better-mannered, but not gents by any true definition of the term. So, in order to fulfil his brief for the Hazama and avoid finding himself on the pointy end of a sword, it seems that Jiro will have to tread very carefully – but even his soft tread may not be enough to keep himself out of danger altogether as war breaks out…

As a yakuza movie, this is an entertainingly gritty affair, definitely aiming for realism, with a distinct lack of choreographed fight scenes or particularly lurid detail (although a definite artistic eye is apparent along the way, with some scenes boasting incredibly innovative work indeed). However, in keeping with many other crime dramas from a culture which is always as different as it is recognisable, there are some criminal conventions here which need a bit of figuring out, although the film yields plenty of results as a result. Once you navigate the mire of convoluted rules and behaviours on display, as well as the extreme, codified politeness which goes hand in hand with tyrannical dealings and bloody murders, then this film can be rewarding. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the most vile behaviour is drawn in pretty broad strokes throughout, thus tying in with the realism angle in some respects, yet also rendering the yakuza gangs as almost cartoonish in their monstrousness in others, as they cheerily torment and assault women (albeit through a range of – mostly – euphemistic 1960s camerawork), recruit card sharps, and generally lie and cheat their way to riches. Quelle change I guess, though at least this is one scenario that social networking won’t be blaming on David Cameron this week…

Perhaps, though, the most interesting thing about this movie (perhaps excepting an appearance by a very young, very meek Meiko Kaji which doesn’t even get a mention in the opening credits) is in its fascinating balance of the urbane and the opulent, the old and the new. This is a modernising Japan, with all of modernisation’s big hitters and poor victims; the city of Takagawa is swallowing up the land on its outskirts, and via the yakuza, it’s displacing the old guard, the old Japan that has been there – as Meiko Kaji’s character Saeko says – ‘for centuries’, and could remain as such if it wasn’t made to change. As kimonos and sharp suits jostle for view in the same shots here, is there a means by which the old guard can still be treated with respect in such a changing world? This becomes Jiro’s predicament, and the catalyst which drives the conflict at the heart of the film. All of this is refracted through some frankly stunning camera-work, deftly demonstrating director Yasuharu Hasebe’s multi-shifting perspectives on the action as it unfolds.

The idea of one man vs. corruption is an old and an established one, but Retaliation manages to carve something of its own out of the premise. Whilst the ‘time capsule’ effect does not necessarily a great movie make, here it’s married effectively to the crime drama at the heart of the plot, and through a range of effective performances Retaliation certainly shows that it has a good deal to offer the curious viewer. As usual, Arrow have presented a worthy version of the film here, with a small range of special features (interviews, stills and a trailer) to accompany the feature itself.

Retaliation is available via Arrow Films from the 11th May 2015.

By Keri O’Shea

When modern life comes crashing down on screen, you can depend on Australian genre cinema to represent this in gratuitous levels of detail, and let’s just say – we love them for it, don’t we? There have been so many examples of ingenious, batshit insane cinema coming out of the antipodes that it would make for a lengthy aside if I started going through them. However, all in all we can at least say it makes for an impressive pedigree, and you can always hope to add another film to the list, so if I was a little underwhelmed by the prospect of reviewing ‘yet another zombie movie’, then Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead soon won me over. Sod subtle and restrained – if you’re cramming your film with the walking dead then you may as well go for it: director Kiah Roache-Turner, in his first feature-length here, clearly knows this and the end results are impressively entertaining.

The plot starts out fairly reliably and familiarly, with an unspecified virus rapidly making its way through small town Australia, turning people into flesh-crazed maniacs and leaving only a small group of survivors thrown together by circumstance, licking their wounds whilst they try to figure out what the hell to do next. We piece together what’s gone on in retrospect, but to tell truth, at the early stages of the film we’re as perplexed as our characters are – one minute, one of the head characters, Barry (Jay Gallagher) is a happily married family man, the next he’s having to dispatch his young daughter with a nail-gun. Ditto, Benny (Leon Burchill) was just out on a hunting trip with his brother, but ended up having to blow his kneecaps out with his shotgun – and still he came after him. One of those days I guess (and there’s a pretty clear indication for you, if you like your zombie horror grisly, that you won’t be disappointed here). For whatever reason, though, these guys haven’t been affected by the initial virus – though they still need to avoid getting bitten – but Barry needs to get down the road to look for his sister, Brooke (Bianca Bradey) who is alive and has been ‘rescued’ by the military, which doesn’t turn out so great for her either…although before too long she has a novel way of turning things around.

If you feel like you could pitch that opening premise – virus, zombies, threat, corrupt establishment – into any number of zombie films, then you’d be right; thing is, once Wyrmwood really gets underway, it demonstrates that it actually has decent, innovative writing behind it. This is no cop-out first film where it’s just a retread of other genre films, even though you can see affectionate nods to several classics along the way. The start of Wyrmwood doesn’t dictate where it’s all going, happily, as there’s far more to it, and if you think you can predict everything that follows, well, then you’d be wrong. Promise. There are some really neat twists to the story which definitely feel in keeping with the genre, but also work really nicely in their own right. They’re daft as a brush but fun, and allow the film to keep things fresh and interesting.

One of the key ways it does this (and I don’t think I’m spoilering, considering the selected quote on the cover, let alone the film’s title itself) is how it marries zombie horror with road movie. Mad Max has been mentioned as a comparison; yeah, in several places, this rings very true. Barry is a bit of a dab hand when it comes to mechanics, see, and so are the fellas he winds up with. A lot of the film takes place through high pursuits and precarious travel scenarios, via kitted-up vehicles and embattled, armoured survivors. The presence in the plot of sister Brooke keeps the film from feeling like a boys’ club, but that said, Wyrmwood has a higher-than-average brawn factor – so look out for modded weapons and fist fights alongside the head-shots and splatter. So yes, Mad Max works as a reference, but to me, the film felt like it could have been adapted from a 2000 AD one-off, especially given its stylised, highly colourised shooting style, which came across looking like a cartoon strip in several places, intentionally or otherwise.

Sure – the whole ‘sprinter with white contact lenses and good cheekbones’ zombie archetype has taken over the genre these days, but the important thing in Wyrmwood that no one, living or (un)dead, phones in their performance. The film works so well as entertainment because quite simply, it has the courage of its convictions. It doesn’t spare anyone’s sensibilities, it takes a batch of good ideas and sees them through, and it never errs on the side of caution. The fact that Wyrmwood 2 is already in the works is good news, as the film has easily done enough to merit a follow-up – not least because it leaves us on a such a cliffhanger…

So is the zombie road movie a thing now? I really hope so. Wyrmwood deserves the steady fandom it’s been gaining, and I look forward to seeing where Brooke and Barry go next – two cult characters in waiting if ever I saw them. If you were feeling burned out on zombies, then this is a great, energised palate cleanser.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead will be released by Studiocanal on 11th May 2015.

By Keri O’Shea

When I saw that The Haunting of Radcliffe House (formerly titled Altar) was set in Yorkshire, I asked for it purely on that basis. Having lived in Yorkshire for around half my life, I think it’s fair to feel a little pride in the place, and although the city I live in is rammed to the gunnels with allegedly haunted pubs and other buildings, ‘ghost walks’ and a wide range of books all proudly discussing just how ghostly the county is, there aren’t many horror films based here. Well, no longer, and interestingly, this one is directed by Nick Willing, whose 1997 film Photographing Fairies badly needs and deserves a decent DVD release. So far, so promising. I notice, though, that Willing hasn’t directed for a while, and certainly hasn’t made anything with this theme before. This may have an overall impact on the film, as he is also the writer here…

Kicking off with a beautiful array of long shots of God’s own acre, it certainly seems as though The Haunting of Radcliffe House is going to deliver. It does feel grounded in Yorkshire – but unfortunately, a lot of the promise of the setting is squandered pretty early on. That’s not to say it’s a dreadful film; it’s just that it’s rather unpolished, and it suffers from a problem lots of supernatural-themed films suffer from. Its script is essentially a re-write of many previously-done scripts. This is a shame, but it seems to be a common obstacle.

Anyway. A pan-Atlantic family – dad Alec (Matthew Mod…Matthew Modine?!) mum Meg (Olivia Williams) and two children that they’ve pulled out of school for several months are heading to the Radcliffe House of the title; Meg is a renovator and she’s been charged by a wealthy client with the task of getting the hall back to how it was in its prime; Alec, meanwhile, can do whatever it is that he does all day – drawing and sculpting, mainly. The house is ramshackle, but that’s not its main issue, as before any time at all has passed we can see that it’s a weird place with unexplained phenomena: rattling pipes, ghostly images on photos, and a constantly rumbling musical score. It has the obligatory secret rooms and doors, but that’s not all: the family is soon warned of the house’s dark history, during which the original owner of the house apparently killed his wife Isabella during a magical ritual. Can Meg overcome her skepticism in time to prevent the house and its ghosts exerting an unholy influence over her family, she asked rhetorically?

Let’s start with what’s good, aside from the attractive shots I mentioned earlier. Firstly, I’d say that Olivia Williams’ performance is a real highlight: she is believable as the wife and mother of the piece, and manages to balance her character’s clear rational thinking with a burgeoning sense of unease, right up until the point where she has to act. On a similar note, the two children (who I assumed were going to pale into the background or else become cliche feckless kids who can’t do anything for themselves) grow into characters in their own right, who have some bearing on how the story plays out. That’s undoubtedly a good thing, and in particular I hope the work continues to arrive for actress Antonia Clarke, as she seems worthy of it. But perhaps the biggest plaudit I can award the film is to say – thank you, thank you for not feeling the need to throw jump scares at us every five minutes, as if the hallmark of a good scary story is being made to leap out of your skin. Far better to opt for the raising-hairs-on-back-of-neck approach, a thing which The Haunting of Radcliffe House achieves during its best moments (people crawling at top speed through background shots? That is creepy – and the darker, more understated scenes shot in the house are the film’s stand-out best).

It’s not all plain sailing though, and somehow in playing this role in a modest-budget, British-set feature, Matthew Modine comes across as having been ripped out of his comfort zone. Perhaps just used to flashier, bigger things, he can’t match Olivia Williams’ performance like for like and often seems to be returning lines of dialogue with an aplomb which just doesn’t suit the context. He also spends a lot of the film off-camera, a fact which is perhaps intended to make the viewer believe he is being influenced by all sorts of malign forces where we can’t see him, but for me it just made him feel less part of the film full stop, and made subsequent developments feel a little thin. His ‘breakdown’ beneath the occult forces of the house, such as it is, feels rather unconvincing – it’s so abrupt and underexplored that it lacks weight.

Add to this a number of characters who seem to have little to actually contribute to the story, and that sense of the plot as rather thinly-spread worsens – with a near-miss on a comic interlude (whether he was trying for it or not) when Steve ‘Erotic Odyssey’ Oram rocks up for a cameo as a paranormal detective. Having opted for a tried-and-tested formula – considering the press release and the blurb I don’t think I’m spoilering if I say ‘possession’ comes to the fore – the film badly needed to focus. At times, however, it felt like it had tried to do more than it realistically could, even given the fairly obvious storyline it decided to follow (which may explain why the more interesting occult plot lines were abandoned!)

So, not a bad film per se, but not a good one either, this is just imbued with too much baggage – including a sizeable case of deja-vu. The Haunting of Radcliffe House has its good elements, but these get lost in the mix. Nick Willing can really bloody direct, though, so fingers crossed this will give him enough impetus to get something else off the ground, get to writing with someone fresh and develop something with much more bite.

The Haunting of Radcliffe House will be released by Image Entertainment on 11th May 2015.