The Haunting of Radcliffe House

Director: Nick Willing
Writer: Nick Willing
Producer: Michele Camarda
Cast: Olivia Williams, Matthew Modine, Antonia Clarke
Country: UK
Year of release: 2014
Reviewed from: TV screening

The Haunting of Radcliffe House is a curious film with an interesting history, and no-one else seems bothered about reviewing it so I guess it’s up to Muggins here. The film has its good points and its bad points. It’s not as awful as one might suppose from reading user reviews on the IMDB but nor is it as good as it could (or should) have been.

Olivia Williams (X-Men 3, Last Days on Mars) and token Yank Matthew Modine are Meg and Alec, a London couple who move into a vast, empty mansion on the Yorkshire moors.  Meg has got the job of restoring this pile for an American client who has recently purchased it. Alec is an artist whose style mostly involves welding square lumps of metal together; he can use part of the building as a workshop. Also moving in are teenage daughter Penny (Antonia Clarke: The Thirteenth Tale) and not-quite-teen son Harper (Adam Thomas Wright: The Awakening).

Locals believe the house to be haunted, or cursed, or something. Local builder Donnelly (Jonathan Jaynes) agrees to help Meg with the fixer-upping but leaves when they discover an occult painting on the floor of a curious, slightly pyramidal room somewhere up on the top floor.

Fairly swiftly, spooky stuff starts happening. Penny receives a genuinely frightening visit from a ghost woman who runs towards her as the girl lies in bed, frozen with fear. Alec cuts himself on a nail and a drop of his blood is absorbed by the house. He starts making artistic sketches of a woman who may or may not be supposed to be Meg, and becomes increasingly obsessed with the artistic possibilities of blood. A ‘ghost whisperer’ (Sightseers’ Steve Oram) contacted online by Penny visits briefly and has psychic flashbacks to an accident involving a garden ornament that was broken but has been restored to its former location.

The good thing about The Haunting of Radcliffe House is that many of the scary bits are genuinely scary. Unlike the mediocre, over-rated Woman in Black (which seems to have kickstarted a renaissance in British ghost films) this does not rely on cheap cat scares. The ghost here is much more frightening than Hammer’s because it doesn’t just lunge screaming at the camera on a regular basis.

Where the film falls down however – and it’s a big tumble – is that there is no logic or coherence to any of the supernatural shenanigans on display. It’s like writer-director Nick Willing just got carried away when writing the script – ooh, and then this scary thing happens, then this – quite forgetting that he was supposed to be crafting a coherent narrative. In a way, that actually helps because each new scare is unexpected and, in its novelty, adds another layer of fright. Something you don’t get if each new scare is the same as the last. But that is offset by the completely random nature of what we see. In the third act for example, Penny gets trapped in a network of previously unmentioned cellars and is stalked by something human running fast on all fours, which is never explained. A little later, Penny and Harper find themselves out on the moors where they come across an artist’s easel with a painting of them, dressed exactly as they currently are. That’s spooky, I’ll grant you, but it doesn’t relate to anything before or after.

The activities of a ghost in a ghost story need to serve a purpose: a warning, or a cry for help, or a lamentation.  The underlying story here is that the owner of Radcliffe House in the mid-19th century was an artist who murdered his wife, and was also a ‘Rosicrucian’ (though quite what that means in this context is neither explored nor explained). But there also seems to have been an accidental death of someone else falling from an upstairs window onto the garden ornament. The ghost of this person turns up in dayight although it only later becomes clear to us and Meg that this was indeed a Victorian ghost, despite wearing modern clothes.

There’s just no clear story here. The ghost’s activities and motivation are all over the place. There’s some talk of transferral of souls and Alec is clearly possessed by something. I think he is under the spell of the former owner (presumably as a result of that minor accident with a nail) and is trying to somehow transfer his dead wife’s soul into Meg. But why would he want to do that if he killed her in the first place? And where does this other ghost fit into it all? The whole thing is just a random grab-bag of (admittedly effective) spookiness masquerading as a (thoroughly unsatisfying) story.

Matters are not helped by some careless lack of attention to detail. At one point a phone in a room  full of clutter starts ringing, although we know that the engineer who was supposed to reconnect the phone didn’t turn up. Spooky. Problem is: the phone is very clearly a 1980s Trimphone which is completely out of context with the other junk. More to the point, the foley artist on this film is presumably not old enough to remember Trimphones and their very, very distinctive sound so has added a standard ‘telephone ring’ sound effect. I don’t care if the caller is some spirit using an unplugged phone: either use a Trimphone sound or a pre-1980s phone prop. (While I’m being pedantic, there’s a scene where Harper and Jenny play Cluedo, which you can’t actually do with just two people.)

Eventually Meg is left lying on the painting underneath a weird, heavy, hanging metal thing that drips blood onto her. There is no explanation or context for this metal thing and, apart from hoping that it won’t pull its rusty bracket from the ceiling and squish the woman’s head, there’s very little reason to feel any concern, empathy or involvement in this scene.

And then there’s the ‘twist’ ending of the film. This is so bad, so unnecessary, so clichéed, so ineptly, unsubtly handled, and generally so stupid that it completely ruins the whole movie, hammering the final nail into something which up to then had been merely ‘not very good’.

The motive force behind The Haunting of Radcliffe House were married couple writer-director Nick Willing and producer Michele Camarda, whose previous BHR entry was 2002 misfire Doctor Sleep aka Hypnotic aka Close Your Eyes. Willing has also directed several mini-series for Hallmark, the two head honchos of which, Robert Halmi Sr and Jr, are credited here as executive producers. But this is a long way from a lavish Hallmark production, being principally funded by Screen Yorkshire. Presumably that funding body was keen to include as many establishing shots of tourist-friendly moorland as possible, and to overlook the film’s underlying message which is: stay away from Yorkshire, our ghosts will try to kill you and your children.

The film was shot in early 2014 under the half-hearted and pointless title Altar. There are a couple of mentions of an altar but there isn’t actually an altar in the film, unless that term refers to the circular floor painting, which isn’t any sort of altar that I would recognise. This was supposedly made with expectation of a theatrical release, but only in the sense that every film bullshits that line. Realistically, Altar was always going to be a straight-to-DVD picture – and hey, there’s no sin in that. But what actually happened was that Channel 5 bought the UK rights, improved the title considerably by changing it to The Haunting of Radcliffe House, and screened the film on terrestrial TV a couple of days after Christmas 2014.

In September that year a Kickstarter campaign was launched, presumably by Willing and Camarda, to raise $40,000 to pay for the film (as Altar) to get a theatrical release in the States. Despite reaching its target in under two months, it’s not clear what that money will pay for because at time of writing (mid-January 2015) the film was still listed on Amazon for a US DVD release in mid-Feb (through a distributor called Cinedigm, and with a truly abysmal sleeve). In any case, even if the film does get to play US theatres I can't see it getting a better response from audiences than it got on British TV.

Willing and Camarda don’t seem to have much luck with distribution. Thirteen years on, Doctor Sleep remains solidly unreleased in the UK under any of its varied titles, Amazon.co.uk offering only American, German and Danish discs. More to the point, one can’t help thinking that if savvy, successful film businessmen like Halmi pere et fils don’t think that a movie is worth backing as a theatrical release, then it’s probably not a sound investment on the part of crowdfunders, most of whom are presumably just really big fans of Modine or Williams.

Reading through the various comments on the IMDB of those who watched Radcliffe House over Christmas, there are numerous accusations of plagiarism: everything from The Shining to The Woman in Black (hey, I just got it: 'Radcliffe' House...) to Hellraiser. Truth be told, I don’t believe Willing set out to deliberately ape well-known horror movies, rather I suspect this is just a side effect of the film’s lack of originality. In randomly bolting together a whole pile of horror film clichés, devoid of the narrative context that might justify them, he has created an effective ‘greatest hits’ package of the genre. And it is natural that in making individual comparisons, the original and/or best known examples of each idea will spring to mind. So yes, a father takes his family to a remote building and then goes nuts but I don’t think Willing watched The Shining and went, “Yes, that’s what I’ll do.” More likely his thought process was: “Lots of horror films feature someone going nuts and threatening their family, often in an isolated setting – that will do me.”

One comparison that is worthy of note – and must be deliberate - is that the film’s basic premise is apparently very similar to ‘The Prayer Tree’, the two-part story which constituted Season 4 of BBC paranormal series Sea of Souls. “When a young couple, Karen and Ian O'Rourke, move into an old home they discover unique symbols painted on the walls. When they post the image on the Internet, Dr. Douglas Monaghan believes they have found the Tree of Life, a symbol of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a 19th century spiritualist group.” - is how the IMDB sums that up.

‘The Prayer Tree’ was written, like most Sea of Souls episodes, by David Kane. Nick Willing directed two episodes in the first season of that series, and Kane wrote the screenplay for Willing’s 2006 Anglo-Canadian thriller The River King. According to the IMDB he also gets a ‘thank you’ on Doctor Sleep. So clearly there is some connection there, but what it is I couldn’t say (and, truth be told, don’t really care).

Perhaps if Kane had written the script for Altar the film might have actually had a plot that made sense. As it is, Willing’s direction is pretty good and he uses a lot of different effects to create his spooky atmosphere, plus the cast are generally fine with particularly impressive performances from Clarke and Knight, but none of this can save the film from its fundamental problem which is simply incoherence and randomness. Things are just thrown into the mix for no reason and to no effect.

For example, at one point Meg discovers that her client didn’t actually buy the house but inherited it (from a previously unknown 19th century relative who had entrusted it to some solicitors). But that has no bearing at all on the (for want of a better word) plot. In fact it adds a layer of confusion because it implies the building has been empty for 170 years, which it plainly hasn’t. And if it had been empty since then, what was a 1980s Trimphone doing there? In fact what was any sort of telephone doing there?

Ironically, one of the top-level perks offered as part of the aforementioned Kickstarter campaign was that Nick Willing was, ahem, willing to provide a professional critique of a screenplay written by the donor. Which sounds good except, Jesus, did no-one provide a critique of this screenplay? Would you trust the critical judgement of someone who thought this abstract bunch of disconnected ideas was ready to be filmed? That’s like a chef who has served up a cold, undercooked meal offering his customers cookery lessons.

Anyway, other cast and crew round-up. There’s Stephen Chance who was the vampiric quizmaster in Kill Keith, Richard Dillane who played Werner Von Braun in 2005 drama-doc Space Race, and David J Peel who had a bit part in Stalled. The music is by Simon Boswell who scored much of Willing’s other work, as well as some crap like Octane and Incubus (plus, famously, some Argento stuff). Top Danish DP Jan Richter-Friis (Wire in the Blood, Powers) lit the film, which was cut by editor David Freeman (The Full Monty). Production designer John Ellis mostly works on Springwatch and Autumnwatch, not the sort of shows you would expect to use a production designer. John Lindlar (White Settlers) designed the costumes; visual effects were supervised by Ben Ashmore (Love Bite, The Harry Hill Movie). A bunch of talented people doing their best, I have no doubt, but as so often happens, the whole thing rests on the script - which, by any standards, is just a jumble of unconnected ideas.  And thus the whole edifice crumbles.

Without some structure and some sense of why – why is this particular spooky thing happening to this person at this time? – a ghost story stops being a ghost story and becomes simply a ghost train. And that’s what we’ve got here. Which is a shame.

At time of writing a British disc from RLJ Entertainment (as The Haunting of...) is listed on Amazon for release in December 2015. Presumably the twelve-month delay indicates that Channel 5 have the rights for a year in case they want to repeat this. It's not because the film, which takes place in the summer, has any connection with Christmas.

MJS rating: C

The Mirror

Director: Ed Boase

Writer: Ed Boase

Producers:  Ed Boase, Hamish Moseley

Cast: Jemma Dallender, Joshua Dickinson, Nate Fallows

Country: UK

Year: 2014

Reviewed from: screener (Matchbox Films)

There’s a bit in one of Dara O’Briain’s stand-up videos where he talks about a feature he saw in the Evening Standard on ‘Ten medical symptoms you must not ignore’, of which the top three were: “rectal bleeding … loss of height … and sudden blindness! Who ignores ‘sudden blindness’?” In The Mirror, a character wakes up completely blind, with massively dilated pupils, and both he and his friends decide that the best thing for him is not a trip to the emergency eye clinic but to just sleep it off. It was at this point that I realised the film’s plot, such as it is, depends in large part on the characters doing completely stupid things. Which is a shame.

The Mirror is the 428th found footage horror movie released this year, by my reckoning, but it at least presents an original justification for its hackneyed let’s-film-everything premise. Flatmates Matt, Jemma and Steve are going to apply for the James Randi $1,000,000 Prize and are filming themselves as their application video. A little background I feel is in order here, as there’s none in the film so viewers unfamiliar with Randi and his work may be confused.

James Randi is a celebrated American magician (now retired) and sceptic. A large part of his life has been spent debunking paranormal claims of all sorts, most famously Uri Geller’s ridiculous spoon-bending antics in the 1970s. In 1964 Randi established a $1,000 prize, on offer to anyone who could provide evidence of supernatural or paranormal abilities or phenomena under controlled conditions. Over the years, the prize money has increased and since 1996 it has been a million bucks. There have been hundreds of applicants, all of whom have agreed to controlled conditions, all of whom have failed miserably (of course) and most of whom have immediately claimed that the conditions they agreed to were unfair.

To save having to deal with every wacko and fruitcake on the planet, Randi used to stipulate that he would only accept applications from people whose ‘abilities’ had already generated some press coverage or who had the backing of an academic institution. In 2011, the rules were changed to allow people to submit a video via YouTube as an alternative. And that’s what Matt, Jemma and Steve are planning to do. Apparently.

The three live in a modern flat in a converted warehouse. Matt and Jemma are an item. Steve is the best-friend gooseberry. Occasional possible hints at a sublimated love triangle are so vague and fleeting that they may just be my imagination (in other words, if there’s supposed to be any sexual tension between Jemma and Steve, nothing is made of it).

But what precisely is the paranormal malarkey which they think will net them a cool million from the James Randi Educational Foundation where so many others have failed? It’s… a haunted mirror. They have bought on eBay a large antique mirror which is supposedly ‘haunted’ in some never-clarified way. And so confident are they that this nonspecific ‘hauntedness’ will be not only genuine but also visibly apparent that they are prepared to invest considerable time, effort and money in videoing the mirror from the moment it arrives. They put it on the living room wall, set up a camera to film it 24 hours a day, and also invest in a second camera and a Go-Pro because “we must film everything.”

And there, as so often, is where the whole ‘found footage’ thing becomes an intrusion, having the very opposite effect on the verisimilitude of the movie to that which the film-makers intend. You don't have to film everything; that’s just creating an arbitrary narrative requirement out of nothing. Furthermore, you’re not going to film everything, if only because you can’t film everything. You’re looking at 24 hours of footage every day from the ‘mirror-cam’ and, say, 16 hours each from the other two cameras, assuming you switch them off when you’re asleep.  So that’s 56 hours of tedious nothing-happening footage to review and edit every day. In a very short space of time most of your personal footage will be of you hunkered over a laptop editing the footage from the previous day: footage of you editing stuff from the day before. It’s going to get so recursive you’ll eventually disappear with a pop like some sort of digital oozlum bird.

As often happens when I watch a found footage film, I rapidly realised that the concept added nothing to the story, which could (and should) have been told better without every single thing being a POV shot. That wouldn’t detract from those occasions when POV was relevant. We could still have been shown footage from the mirror-cam, for instance, staring through its unblinking lens at a reflection of the camera itself while our own vision flicks around the glass rectangle and the ‘other room’ it reveals, searching for something spookily out of place.

Good luck with that by the way. Let me tell you here that this is a possibly unique entry in the subgenre of ‘haunted mirror’ horror films in that absolutely nothing unusual or spooky appears in the mirror. Nothing. Nothing ever. It just shows the room, the camera and anyone standing in front of it. We don’t see anything out of the ordinary, nor do the three flatmates. To put it bluntly, the fact that the ‘haunted’ item is a mirror is completely irrelevant. It could have been a haunted candlestick, a haunted alarm clock, a haunted pizza-cutter or a haunted Swedish-made penis enlarger for all the difference it would make to the plot. It is, in short, just A Mirror.

So as I say, a regular film could still have shown us the initially intriguing but ultimately disappointing mirror-cam footage, and could also have included footage from the other camera and the Go-Pro if their existence was considered relevant to the plot. Heck, there’s no law against just showing a character’s point of view. Film-makers have done that for decades. It helps the audience to identify with and empathise with the character in question: we see through their eyes and for that instant we are that character. Found footage as a format destroys that identification and empathy by making everything POV – even moreso here as the multiple cameras mean that often we are initially unsure whose point of view we are actually viewing.

Now, if the mirror itself doesn’t do anything, what constitutes the plot? Well, Matt starts sleepwalking, becomes increasingly irascible and refuses to share the Go-Pro footage with the others. There are some sharp kitchen knives which become relevant in a way that I won’t describe in detail to avoid spoilers, except to note that seven minutes from the end of the film one character finally has the bleeding obvious idea of, you know, hiding them. Matt’s behaviour is blamed by Jemma and Steve on the mirror - but there’s no connection at all, except that he started acting oddly after the mirror was brought into the flat. Honestly, it’s astounding how irrelevant the mirror is to the plot of The Mirror. All through the film I was expecting something to happen, something to appear, but there’s nothing. The closest we get is an odd coincidence in one of several 1920s newspaper clippings stuck to the back of the mirror for some never-explained reason (these are dated very precisely, so either the 1920s clipper carefully wrote the date on each bit of paper or they are all from the corner of the page).

Actual events are few and far between. There is a short scene with a Ouija board which made my heart sink but nothing comes of it and it’s never mentioned again. Maybe there’s some sort of EU directive that all low-budget horror movies must contain a Ouija board scene. There is also a sequence where the trio return from an evening out to find the door ajar and the flat wrecked, which they are sure is conclusive proof of ghostly activity. And not, you know, burglars. Which is a more likely explanation, even in a ghost movie, because why the hell would a paranormal entity emanating from an item in the flat need to open the door?

So do they report this break-in to the police? Apparently not. (That is: if they do tell the cops, we’re not told or shown it and it’s never referred to.) Instead, they swiftly restore the flat to its previous pristine condition and never mention it again. And it is pristine, this place. It doesn’t look at all like three young people live there. I know young people are duller and more boring than in my day and it doesn’t have to look like the house in The Young Ones, but they would still make a mess, they would still leave clutter. Young people still put posters on their walls; I’ve seen them. But not these three dullards apparently. No attempt has been made to dress the location to make it believable, thereby further robbing the film of credibility.

In that respect, this cypher of a location reflects the three cyphers who live there. It dawned on me halfway through that these three people have no existence outside of the film. Are they students? Do they have jobs? They're certainly not unemployed slackers in that nice flat. Do they have families or any other friends? Who knows? The three of them and their one location are a self-contained microcosm which exists only for the purposes of the 83 minutes we spend with them, and as such neither they nor their lives are believable in any way.

The upshot of all this is that The Mirror, I am sad to report, is very, very dull. Almost nothing happens, and when it does happen, it’s not interesting or believable. About an hour in, this pattern is briefly broken by a couple of nasty, gory moments (one of them completely given away by the DVD sleeve!) which are the indisputable high points of the film. Not because of the gore, but because something freaking happens. Furthermore, this overall lack of story has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing the viewer to pay more attention to the nuts and bolts of the film and hence further flags up the inadequacies of the found footage conceit. Unless a camera is being carried by someone in a state of panic, everything is framed just so. Nobody’s head is ever cut off, except for one shot where the director doesn’t want us to see a character’s face so the frame cuts them off at the neck. And everything is lit to be spooky; I lost track of the number of scenes where someone prowls around the flat in semi-darkness when there is no reason at all not to just switch on the damn light.

On the plus side however, at least none of the footage breaks up and goes BZZZT! like in Hungerford and Dark Vision. These guys bought decent cameras that actually work. There is just a little bit of digital blocking on occasions which is so believable that it might even be real.

Beyond the camera-work it’s the editing (by director Ed Boase) that really lets the film down; not because it’s bad but because – you guessed it – it’s good. The whole thing has been professionally edited like a regular movie. The use of multiple cameras to film the same thing results in lots of cuts between characters, cuts to close-ups, elliptical time-lapses, the sort of construction that we expect in a movie but which completely destroys the premise that this ‘footage’ has been ‘found’. A successful found footage movie, like Cloverfield for example, works on the premise that a series of long, unedited takes have been shot in chronological sequence on a single camcorder. Once that idea is lost, we’re no longer dealing with found footage.

A caption at the end of the film reads: “This footage was recovered by police in the search for the missing flatmates. It has since been submitted to the James Randi Foundation. The Mirror has never been found.” What? Did the police take the hours and hours and hours of footage on the cameras and laptops in the flat and edit together about an hour and a half of it very carefully, using lots of cinematic conventions, including plenty of character-establishing stuff from before anyone started acting oddly? Oh, and then they decided to submit it to the JREF, did they? Because that million dollars could buy them some shiny new walkie-talkies and new upholstery for the squad cars, I suppose…

And just what is it that is being submitted for Randi’s prize anyway? There’s nothing supernatural, paranormal or in any way unexplainable in any of this footage: no ghosts, no poltergeists, no telekinesis. Looks to me like a simple case of mental breakdown and psychosis which is blamed on a ‘haunted’ mirror in a classic case of ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’, a common delusion familiar to anyone interested in scepticism. Plus the fact that these people don’t call 999 when (a) their flat is ransacked or (b) one of them is rendered blind proves what morons they are and doesn’t give me confidence in anything they say on screen. (The non-supernatural explanation for the blindness is shown to us beforehand via the Go-Pro footage but apparently neither of the other two bothered to watch this.)

What a thoroughly disappointing and dispiriting experience The Mirror is. Which is a real shame because this has obviously been made with care and with passion. Technically it’s highly commendable (which is, as noted, not necessarily a good thing in this type of film). The largely improvised dialogue is smart and believable, even if the characters and plot aren’t. Above all, it features three absolutely terrific performances from three very talented actors. But since their characters have no reality, the story doesn’t hang together in any way, and the audience is constantly distracted by not wanting to miss the spooky image in the mirror which must surely, eventually appear… no? … ah well … this excellent acting is wasted in a film which, with the best will in the world, simply doesn’t work.

Jemma is played by Jemma Dallender, who also starred in Community and I Spit on Your Grave 2. Matt is Joshua Dickinson, creator/star of both the stage and screen versions of Opening Night of the Living Dead. And Steve is Nate Fallows who was in an episode of Whitechapel. If nothing else, The Mirror is a great showcase for all three. Brief roles for Abby Ford (Prisoner of Azkaban) and Roisin Rae in exterior scenes round out the cast.

The Mirror is based on a real case, sort of. In February 2013 two men in London advertised a ‘haunted mirror’ on eBay, a novelty story which attracted the attention of the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post (but no other papers, who could see what a load of crap it was). A quick google will bring up press coverage of these guys who allegedly picked up an old antique mirror from a skip, painted the frame and then started getting all manner of random, spooky occurrences, ranging from the nebulous (feelings of dread – jeez, get over it) to the ectoplasmic (smoky apparitions and other stuff that might have enlivened this film). I get the impression that the more remarkable phenomena were added to the story to keep the press interested, but maybe that’s just me. Incidentally, I love how the liberal Huff Post refers to these two men as ‘a couple’ but in the conservative Mail they are merely ‘flatmates’!

As a result of this publicity the mirror apparently sold for £100 to an anonymous buyer. But as many web commenters observed, if the thing that these guys got for free was causing them so much upset, why didn’t they just chuck it back in the skip instead of keeping it in the house while the eBay ad ran and gullible/bored journos came round to interview them.

Ed Boase also came round to interview them and this forms a 14-minute extra on the Mirror DVD. He then apparently decided that this idea of a haunted mirror would make a great horror film and set to making it, the finished movie premiering at the 2014 Frightfest just ahead of the disc’s release. Being of a cynical turn of mind, I can’t help wondering whether the two men are actually mates of Ed’s and the whole thing around the eBay ad was just a big scam, designed to provide a convenient publicity hook for the film when it finally appeared. Especially as Ed has said he was offered the chance to use the actual original mirror in the film, which shouldn’t have been possible if it really had been snapped up by an anonymous buyer. Frankly, if the whole story is BS and the 14-minute interview is fake, then I find that more interesting and entertaining than the feature, which surely was never the intention.

The Mirror was shot (as Haunted Mirror) over nine days in the summer of 2013 with a couple of pick-ups later for brief outdoor scenes. The budget of £10,000 apparently included 500 quid to the real mirror guys for exclusive rights to their story, which was a pretty good deal as it’s five times what they got for their actual crappy old (non-haunted) mirror on eBay! They also get a ‘special thanks’ credit. The location was an unfurnished flat in East London, which a company was paid to furnish, but the absence of a production designer (none is credited) is glaring. The place looks like these three have just moved in (as indeed they have).

Cinematographer Keidrich Wasley does a good job on his feature debut after numerous shorts and music videos, adroitly handling the different light levels (even if, as noted, they’re not always needed) and letting us believe that the cast are always holding the camera. He also shares story and editing credits with Boase. Tim Quinton (Doctor Who, Bloody Cuts, The Harry Hill Movie) designed and applied the prosthetics for the later, nasty bits, while Natalie Wickens (Dead Cert, Devil’s Playground, Umbrage, Zombie Diaries 2) handled the regular make-up. There is no credited costume designer. Neill Gorton’s company Millennium FX provided ‘sfx’ but these don’t extend as far as any apparitions, ghosts or demons, sadly. Indie rock quintet Of Mercia were responsible for the music apparently but I can’t honestly recall any; the found footage concept precludes incidental music and the end credits play out in silence. Maybe they were on a radio or something. Was there a radio in any scene?

This is Boase’s second feature after Blooded, a 2011 BHR spin on The Most Dangerous Game in which hunt protestors chase down hunters. I haven’t seen that but Variety called it “a promising but flawed debut … [with] … a half-clever, half-pointless pseudo-documentary framing device”. On the evidence of The Mirror - which I really, really wanted to like more than I did – Boase has the talent and just needs to channel it into a feature that relies on a well-thought-out story and credible characters rather than a novelty filmic concept, especially when it’s not such a novelty any more.

MJS rating: B-

Freakdog

Director: Paddy Breathnach
Writer: Spence Wright
Producers: Mark Huffam, Michael Kelly
Cast: Arielle Kebbel, Andrew Lee-Potts, Martin Compston
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: online 

Andrew Lee-Potts is quite the horror star, isn’t he? He was in not one but two British fantasy series of the noughties: Andrew Marshall’s Strange (alongside Richard Coyle, Samantha Janus and Ian Richardson) and infantile ITV dinosaur nonsense Primeval (a show which had great promise in its first season then jumped the shark like nothing I’ve ever seen before).

On the big screen he was in The Bunker and 1408 and Return to House on Haunted Hill. He was in vampire movie True Bloodthirst for SyFy and an episode of the 2013 Dracula TV series and he was in a stage production of Dracula in London in 2012. And he was in Red Mist aka Freakdog, one of two horror films produced by Simon Bosanquet and Mark Huffam’s Generator Entertainment with funding from Northern Ireland Screen. Last week I watched Ghost Machine (‘from the makers of Red Mist’) so now it’s time to take a look at Red Mist, which Anchor Bay have very kindly made available for free through their YouTube channel.

Potts plays Kenneth, a young man with learning difficulties working as a porter in an American hospital. A completely unnecessary prologue combines footage of Kenneth fondling a female corpse in the hospital morgue with a flashback of his childhood when he saw his prostitute mother beaten up by one of her clients. Neither of these scenes will have any bearing on the rest of the film.

Next we are introduced to seven medical students who initially are pretty identikit. One is a goth, one is vaguely Asian, that’s about it, although they do become more clearly defined as the movie progresses. They go to a local bar and somehow stay for a lock-up (possibly one of them isn’t a med student but actually owns the bar - it’s a bit unclear). Kenneth stutteringly wants to join them but by that time they’re not only fairly drunk, they are also high on some pills which they swiped from the hospital pharmacy. Rejected and taunted, Kenneth heads off into the night but not before revealing that he has filmed the pill-swiping incident on his mobile phone.

Worried that this will destroy their careers before they have begun, the students persuade their nicest member, Cat (on whom Kenneth has a crush) to invite him back, but only so that they can render him unconscious and wipe his phone memory. Cruelly cajoled into drinking a cocktail of booze and drugs, Kenneth has an epileptic fit and falls off a table. After some heated debate, the gang decide to drive him to hospital but just push him out of the car and zoom off before being seen. Which they do.

See, here’s the basic problem. These folk are supposed to be junior doctors. And to be a junior doctor you need two things. First, compassion and empathy (okay, that’s two things but they’re related). I’m not saying no doctor is a bastard (hem hem, Harold Shipman anyone?) but normally if a doctor turns bad that's when they’re experienced, old, bitter and cynical. No-one trains to be a doctor unless they genuinely want to help people.

The other thing that tends to mark out medical students is that they are generally fairly sensible. And intelligent. That’s not to say that junior doctors don’t know how to partay. Wow, they can have some wild times and they can get blind drunk, although I think you’ll find that knocking back prescription drugs in a public bar, especially stolen prescription drugs, is pretty rare among trainee medicos. Mainly because they know what those drugs are and what effect they can have on a metabolic level.

So I just don’t buy the behaviour of these supposedly empathetic, intelligent junior doctors when they steal dangerous meds, force them onto a mentally disabled colleague and then decide to not call an ambulance in order to save their futures. There is a ring-leader of course, Sean (Scottish actor Martin Compston from Monarch of the Glen, whose other BHR credits include Doomsday, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, When the Lights Went Out, Piggy and Strippers vs Werewolves); the others are on a sort of sliding scale of shittiness between Sean and Cat. But still, essential though it is for the plot, this behaviour doesn’t ring true.

Anyways, the next day it turns out that Kenneth is in a coma from which he is not expected to emerge. Cat feels guilty, reads up some scientific papers and decides that she might be able to revive him with an experimental drug which she is able to easily obtain from the pharmacy by forging a senior doctor’s signature. But this drug doesn’t actually awaken Kenneth, instead it gives him the power to psychically control other people. And he sets about using this power to wreak revenge on the seven people who hurt him. Yes, it's an Irish version of Patrick. Maybe they should have called it Paddy? Maybe not...

We’re nearly halfway through the film by this point, but things are picking up. Not just the violence and gore - the second death in particular is absolutely stomach-churningly brilliant - but also the tension, the fear, the plot and even the characterisation. It’s somewhat ironic that the way-too-long first act, following on from the irrelevant prologue, means we only really start getting to know stuff about these people - like what their names are - once they start dying.

Freakdog (which is the term of abuse directed at Kenneth in the bar, then directed back at the victims) is considerably better than Ghost Machine. Not perfect by any means, but still generally good. The tension builds, we really feel for Cat’s plight as she tries to save both herself and her friends, and there is a rare example of a believable police investigation into the multiple murders. Plus a really impressive twist towards the end that changes everything Cat thinks.

On the downside, the film’s final sequence is just daft, involving a completely unbelievable escape from a police station and the sudden appropriation of a completely unlikely piece of electrical equipment. The film would have been considerably improved if it had ended bleakly after Cat’s twist. But there you go: what’s done is done.

This was the first (and so far only) produced script by Spence Wright, who is currently part of the team trying to generate funding for Vampires vs Leprechauns. He certainly crafted a good solid screenplay for this movie, albeit one that would have been improved by judiciously removing the first few pages and the last couple too. Director Paddy Breathnach is a Dubliner whose previous picture was Shrooms, well received but too Irish to be part of the BHR.

Cat is played by Yank Arielle Kebbel (Reeker, Aquamarine, The Grudge 2, The Uninvited, Vampires Suck and a recurring role on The Vampire Diaries), whose name is rather embarrassingly spelled wrong in the trailer. The five other medical students are played by Canadian Sarah Carter (Mindstorm, Wishmaster 3, Final Destination 2, Skinwalkers); Alex Wyndham (who is British but was in Dave Parker’s The Hills Run Red); Irish Katie McGrath (Morgana in Merlin and Lucy Westenra in the 2013 Dracula series); Londoner Christina Chong (Chemical Wedding, Johnny English Reborn and an episode of Black Mirror) who is clearly Chinese but playing a character with a Japanese name; and Michael Jibson (Devil’s Bridge, Panic Button) who is from Hull.

MyAnna Buring (post-Descent, pre-Kill List) has a small but important role as a nurse, and the senior doctors are played by Stephen Dillane (The Gathering, Game of Thrones) as the only character with a British accent, and twinkly-eyed Canadian actor Michael J Reynolds whose career goes right back to 1971 obscurity The Reincarnate and takes in Police Academy, Blue Monkey, My Pet Monster, Gorillas in the Mist, Extreme Measures and The Descent Part 2. According to the IMDB, among his 116 credits he has played 14 doctors, as well as 13 military officers, seven judges, five politicians (including two different fictional US Presidents) and one preacher.

Colin Stinton, who plays the detective investigating the case, is Canadian born but has a string of British credits including Ghostwatch, A Very Peculiar Practice, Tomorrow Never Dies, Ali G Indahouse, Thunderpants and the 2006 remake of A for Andromeda - plus The Bourne Ultimatum. Nick Hardin, playing a security guard, was in a horror film called Bad Karma - but not the Alex Chandon one!

Art Parkinson (Rickon Stark in Game of Thrones) is young Kenneth in the prologue, with Bronagh Taggart as his mother and Emmett Scanlan (Hollyoaks, Colour from the Dark) as the man. Derek Halligan - who was in Rawhead Rex and Enda Hughes’ legendary short film Flying Saucer Rock’n’Roll - plays the world’s most useless hospital pharmacist. Belfast’s Musgrave Park Hospital plays the fictitious Fort Haven Hospital, New England (a careless snafu sees the town name spelled Forthaven on the police cars).

Premiering at the 2008 Frightfest, Freakdog had a very brief UK theatrical release in 2009. Working out which title was used when/where is difficult even at this short remove, with various DVD sleeve designs existing online with both titles. The version posted online by Anchor Bay in 2011 uses Red Mist. Not that it really matters. This is a reasonably slick, reasonably gory, reasonably entertaining slice of British horror whose plus points (good cast, good story once it eventually gets going, solid direction) generally outweigh its minor failings.

MJS rating: B-

Bhoot

Director: Ramgopal Varma
Writers: Sameer Sharma, Lalit Marathe
Producer: Nitin Manmohan
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Urmila Matondkar, Nana Patekar
Year of release: 2003
Country: India
Reviewed from: UK theatrical release

Every year about two dozen or so Indian films get released theatrically in the UK, but unless you have the good fortune to live in a city with a large Asian population (like my home town of Leicester) you’ll probably never have a chance to see any of them. Mostly they’re comedies or thrillers, so it’s a real treat to get to see an honest-to-goodness Hindi horror movie.

‘Bhoot’ is Hindi for ‘ghost’ and even if you don’t know that, the spooky poster is a clue that this is a horror flick. My local Odeon (who often screen Indian films) listed this in their publicity as a ‘romantic drama’ which it certainly isn’t, but then they also said that it’s three hours long. Bhoot is about two hours long and is terrific. The first couple of reels in particular feature some of the scariest images I’ve seen for years that literally had me jumping out of my seat. With the possible exception of (very different) Thai/Hong Kong flick The Eye, this is the most frightening horror film I’ve seen since The Sixth Sense.

The action centres on a young, affluent couple, Vishal (Ajay Devgan, more normally seen in action roles) and Swati (Urmila Matondkar) who move into a nice duplex apartment several stories up a tower block in Mumbai. The previous owner - and her son - both fell to their deaths from the balcony but Vishal is not worried by that and Swati doesn’t (initially) know.

Vishal goes to work all day leaving Swati alone in the flat except when the (rather timid) cleaner (Seema Biswas) comes round. We get a couple of extremely well-done glimpses of two ghosts, a young woman and a small boy, which unnerve us though Swati doesn’t spot them. When she does get a first glimpse of the young woman, she’s as scared as the audience. Her husband calms her but the ‘hallucinations’ become more frequent, stronger and more complex. There’s a great sequence in a cinema (they’re watching Spider-Man!) and a really scary scene on a crowded beach.

When Swati also takes to sleepwalking, Vishal takes her to an eminent psychiatrist (Victor Banerjee: Dr Aziz in A Passage to India) who diagnoses multiple personality disorder. Swati remains convinced that what she is experiencing is supernatural and becomes increasingly paranoid and depressed. Things take a sinister new turn when Vishal finds his wife missing. She has been sleepwalking around the building and when he checks in the lobby he finds something really shocking - which I won’t give away except to say that this now becomes a police matter. Nana Patekar (Salaam Bombay) plays a police lieutenant who has his eye on Vishal, Swati and their apartment.

The second act becomes more predictable as the young woman’s ghost fully possesses Swati, necessitating her restraint. This is familiar territory for director Ramgopal Varma who previously made Raat, notorious as ‘the Indian Exorcist’. The cleaner suggests calling in whatever the Indian equivalent of an exorcist is, in this case an exotic young woman garbed in red (Rekha, who has made a staggering 118 movies since her debut as a child actor in 1966, including Karma Sutra: A Tale of Love, recent SF epic Koi... Mil Gaya and a 1992 film called Time Machine!). The question of whether Swati genuinely is possessed or whether there might turn out to be a medical/psychological explanation is thoroughly resolved in the third act which ramps up the horror again to reach an ultimately satisfying conclusion, both morally and cinematically.

Bhoot was made for 150 million Rupees - about two million pounds - which is actually quite tight for such a prestigious Bollywood movie, and has the unusual distinction of opening simultaneously in cinemas in India (250 screens), the UK (well, Leicester) and the United States (well, Manhattan). The British prints have an Indian Film Board certificate but not a BBFC one.

Only in India would a director have to put a disclaimer before the opening credits stating that the film is designed only to scare audiences and does not mean he actually believes in the supernatural (well, maybe not only in India, but certainly not in the UK or USA!). India is a big country with thousands of years of tradition and there are many places where belief in magic and the supernatural is still rock-solid.

Despite this disclaimer and the credits being in English, there are no subtitles - but do not worry. English is a fairly universal second language on the subcontinent and all the characters slip into it from time to time, sometimes individual words and sometimes whole sentences. About five per cent of the dialogue is in English, enough for the fairly straightforward plot to be easily followed (apparently the prints released in the USA do have subtitles, as did a print shown on British TV at Halloween 2004). It also helps that the film is extremely well directed and the acting is top notch - especially from Matondkar whose descent into madness is seamlessly terrifying, aided by some subtle yet effective make-up.

Although the obvious influences are mostly western (The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, even a nod to Night of the Living Dead), the film is distinctively Indian. The starey-eyed female ghost’s appearance and body language suggests that Varma may also have seen Ring. Much use is made of the isolation of the couple’s apartment with frequent overhead shots of the building’s lift going up or down. In India horror is associated with the countryside and to set a spook flick in such a modern, urban setting is a bold move.

The sound mix (credited to Owarak Warrier) is fantastic with a full orchestral score that makes up for in punch what it lacks in originality. The music by 'Salim-Sulaiman' (Salim and Sulaiman Merchant: Krrish) builds tension - which Varma drags out as long as he can before a massive chord crashes in with a cut to what we want to see (or don’t want to!). Kudos also to cinematographer Vishal Sinha and editor Shimit Amin who make the film look like the slickest Hollywood production. And it helps that Urmila Matondkar, like many Indian starlets, is twenty times more gorgeous than most A-list Hollywood actresses (Ajay Devgan’s a good-looking guy too). The cast are uniformly excellent in fact; most of them are massive stars in Bollywood though only Banerjee has recognisability in the west.

Indian horror films are nothing new. The Ramsay Brothers made the genre their own in the 1970s with notorious Hammer-influenced frightfests like Bandh Darwaza and Khooni Dracula while more recent offerings have included the hit movie Raaz and the kids film Makdee: The Web of the Witch.

If Bhoot plays near you, take a chance and go see it. It’s not three hours long, it has no song and dance numbers - drop that stereotype of Indian cinema! - it’s just a stormingly good horror film.

MJS rating: A

Review originally posted before November 2004