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How entertaining? ★☆☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 29 December 2014
This article is a review of THE WOMAN IN BLACK: ANGEL OF DEATH. |
“Our worst enemy is ourselves,” Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory)
The original WOMAN IN BLACK in terms of scares:
Film > novel > play
Screenwriter Jane Goldman, director James Watkins and team delivered a potent haunted house horror, in an era when genuinely frightening movies are thin on the ground. Sidestepping a need for gore, or cheap jump-in-your-seat moments, elevated their achievement all the more. Stiff upper lip, buttoned down Victorian era Brits made the terror they faced hit home harder.
No sequel was required. Nowhere did one hear requests. But true to horror flick form, a follow-up has been spewed forth. And what a dire offering has resulted.
The original WOMAN IN BLACK in terms of scares:
Film > novel > play
Screenwriter Jane Goldman, director James Watkins and team delivered a potent haunted house horror, in an era when genuinely frightening movies are thin on the ground. Sidestepping a need for gore, or cheap jump-in-your-seat moments, elevated their achievement all the more. Stiff upper lip, buttoned down Victorian era Brits made the terror they faced hit home harder.
No sequel was required. Nowhere did one hear requests. But true to horror flick form, a follow-up has been spewed forth. And what a dire offering has resulted.
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Moving from the turn of the century to the Blitz of the Second World War, we get an atmosphere-less prologue, in an underground station tunnel, as the Luftwaffe bomb London. Girl-next-door schoolteacher, and lead, Eve Parkin (Phoebe Fox), is introduced, being plucky and cute. At the train station the next morning, she is dressed down by haughty, brittle boss, headmistress Jean Hogg (McCrory), who also shows short shrift to a young pupil, Edward (Oaklee Pendergast), just orphaned. Excuse for such lack of compassion, we later find out, is due to angst over a relative fighting in the conflict. Her eventual about-turn, like her initial behaviour, does not ring true.
Evacuation of London has begun. Children are being taken to the countryside to be out of the war zone. Eve and Jean and a small coterie of their pupils are being sent to, you guessed it, Eel Marsh House - home of nightmarish spectre, the Woman in Black. On a Hogwarts express style train, Jean meets bright-eyed Royal Air Force pilot Harry Burnstow (Jeremy Irvine). Staid flirting sets off the twee romance klaxons. Coincidentally Harry is stationed near their ghostly new home from home.
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Taking an age to reach chez Woman in Black, avoids tension building for drab padding. Coach tire bursting, transporting the vulnerable congregation from the middle-of-nowhere train station to Eel March House, allows a lame scene involving a neglected house containing a raving man. Blood running cold? Nope, like the entire movie, all attempts are based on skill-less cheap scares. That house will later randomly feature as a plot point.
Once ensconced at their final destination, the Woman in Black decides to team up with Edward against the others, because he is being bullied. Eh? Doesn’t she hate all kids? Trauma at losing his parents has rendered him mute. One guesses, from the ANGEL OF DEATH’s behaviour, this affliction is meant to be a diverging tool of vulnerability/sinister threat. Eye-rolling narrative crutch is more the outcome. Eve meanwhile has visions of having her baby taken away, for tenuous theme building.
What a waste of resources. (If you like incessantly leaping out of your skin, check out Thai photography-related horror, SHUTTER.)
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