Director: Andrew Jones
Year: 2015
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: A Haunting in Pendle Hill; The Unhinged
Genre: Haunted House
Plot:
Moving into a new house, a father and his daughter, trying to get on with their lives, grow concerned that there’s someone or something living in their house when they encounter a series of strange phenomena inside, and the more they stay there, they come to learn the terrifying truth.
Review:
This was an abysmally bad and barely worthwhile genre effort. About the only thing that would be interesting here revolves around the creepiness of the early scenes in the house where they’re slowly coming aware of the supernatural antics within. With the presence of the genuinely creepy porcelain doll and the sightings of something moving around the house provide hints that there’s something going on within the house. As it slowly starts to emerge that something horrific happened in the house’s past, and it is coming to light due to their presence within the house, this one works within the usual confines of the genre to generate an attempt at a creepy enough atmosphere in theory.
Beyond that, though, the film is pretty dire and not all that interesting. The main problem is that nothing genuinely happens with that atmosphere, focusing on the father/daughter relationship that is more comical for the background information than anything that develops between them on-screen, or the series of shady characters that become involved yet contribute nothing to the film proper. They serve the function of providing the background information on the house and its history, yet do nothing else beyond that, so the film feels incredibly straightforward and churned out as if by numbers due to the formulaic approach it all comes off as. Filling roles in a story rather than doing anything genuinely interesting is the kind of approach that makes it come off as lazy and underwhelming.
That also highlights the other problem, where it’s just plain dull and lifeless for so much of the running time that it’s hard to feel any kind of excitement, suspense, or chills from anything happening. Even without taking into account how formulaic it all is, the fact that the hauntings are handled in a few minutes after arriving and then just absolutely disappear so that it can do the background information on everything, or handle the inclusion of the other paranormal mediums that are necessary to pull off the story attempted here. Even with all the excess pudding done here in these moments to try to bring the film’s running time up even slightly to give it more of a feature-length feel, these all manage to bring down the film overall.
Overview: 0.5/5
A lifeless, dull, and generally underwhelming genre effort, there’s little to like with this one or even to manage to be quite enjoyable, so it comes off as one of the more worthless entries in the style. Really, only give this one a chance if you’re curious about it or are fans of the creative crew, while most others out there should outright avoid it.
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