Halloween Horror Month 2021

[Aclea]

22 & 23



Despite featuring a protective poltergeist, it would be a mistake to think of decent little British quota quickie The House in Marsh Road as a horror movie since it’s more of drama that gradually moves into crime of passion territory, albeit of a rather pathetic and sordid nature. When Patricia Dainton inherits a house in a small village from a long-estranged aunt she sees it as a chance to finally stop having to run out on landlord after landlord owing three weeks rent and settle down in a place she can finally call her own but her would-be novelist husband Tony Wright, who carries a wallet full of forged notes to flash around to get out of paying a deposit while spending his few real ones down at the pub, sees it as a chance to sell it for enough money to live it up in London. She’s having none of it, but when he falls for divorced typist Sandra Dorne he starts to think that if she’ll only sell over her dead body that might not be such a bad idea – but ‘Patrick,’ the poltergeist has other ideas…

Despite the luridly and blatantly dishonest American advertising campaign (‘Murder stalks victim after victim in the house of terror!’) there’s very little in the way of supernatural manifestations – furniture is found in different places to where it was left, the odd plate falls, a bottle of ink is found spilled over the unfaithful hubby’s manuscript – most, aside from an incident with a mirror and an ill-judged moment with a chair in the climax, kept offstage and merely discovered. Nor does it ever set out to summon up much of a chilling atmosphere, the characters simply accepting the poltergeist’s presence and regarding it as an occasional annoyance as they get on with their lives. Instead, the emphasis is more on a relationship that was tolerable when both were in dire straits but becomes increasingly difficult when she assumes the power (the house and then-decent £1000 inheritance are in her name) and his knowledge of legal loopholes and petty scams that were once so necessary to their survival become redundant.

Make no mistake, this is no weighty drama or penetrating character study, merely an above average supporting feature that’s much better than it needed to be, capably directed by Montgomery Tully, decently acted (particularly by Rank Charm School graduate Dainton) and surprisingly entertaining for those willing to accept its modest ambitions. Oh, and if you’re wondering why the poltergeist is called Patrick, it’s after the housekeeper’s husband – crazy, unpredictable and invisible!

Picture quality is nothing outstanding – better than many of Renown’s ‘digitally remastered’ transfers but still filtered and DNRed enough for a couple of handwritten notes shown onscreen to be harder to read than they should be.



Another damp squib from the company that bought out the Hammer name, The Quiet Ones is one of those throwbacks to 60s and 70s films that went bump in the night like The Haunting and The Legend of Hell House that looks good on paper but despite making all the right noises just doesn’t seem able to make it work. Aside from an excellent Olivia Cooke as the subject of the experiment it’s full of those curious performances where the cast are technically doing the right things but can’t convince you for a moment that it’s a real person doing them, and co-writer/director John Pogue’s pseudo-documentary style intercutting found footage into scenes, complete with dull desaturated colour and earth tones to emphasise it’s set in the 70s before primary colours were invented, just adds another layer of artifice to the proceedings rather than give them a feeling of reality. Of course, it’s not helped in that by being the kind of film where as soon as the disapproving Oxford University deans withdraw the funding for Jared Harris’ experiments into the cause of Cooke’s telekinetic abilities and apparent possession, he simply moves her from the small urban semi-detached house he’s been keeping her locked up in to a rambling country house that probably costs more than the film did to save money while Sam Claflin’s documentarist mutters about using cheaper film stock while still constantly wasting film on the most inconsequential things.

The script is often trite in the extreme: “Cure one patient, cure all mankind” is the mantra of Harris’ parapsychologist, who seems under the delusion that being able to diagnose the cause of the very troubled Cooke’s telekinetic outbursts will automatically mean he can cure them (you don’t need a degree to figure out the fallacy in that kind of thinking). Naturally he simply unleashes Hell – or, as regular moviegoers call it, same old, same old - in a series of experiments and séances that seem arbitrary and unfocused and usually end with the camera jerking away after a loud noise breaks the silence. Things start to get mildly interesting around the two thirds point as it floats the possibility that Harris is exploiting a mentally disturbed girl and sensationalising his experiments to make his reputation and that she doesn’t want to be rid of the entity inside her for fear of losing his attention, but the film only briefly flirts with the ideas before going back to going bump in the night. And indeed, as befits its title (which is only mentioned in passing near the end of the film in a scene that feels as if it were only written so it could be used in the trailer) it takes the Idris Elba approach to cheap shocks: talk very, very, very softly and then SCREAM AT THE TOP OF ITS LUNGS RIGHT IN YOUR FACE. Subtle it ain’t, relying too much on sound design and scoring to send the occasional purely mechanical chill down your spine rather than going the old-fashioned route of constructing a genuinely unnerving scene: high frequencies and amping up the volume rather than genuinely chilling content.

After a bit of Blair Witchery in the attic after the lights go out the pace finally picks up and the film starts to throw in a few underdeveloped ideas and plot twists as Harris finally goes all Lionel Atwill with a hypo, a cricket bat and a patient strapped to a gurney before the mandatory crap epilogue that every modern horror film has to have. But by then it feels as if nobody really had a clear idea of what the film was going to be about but just tried a bit of everything out of desperation, something the 27 minutes of deleted scenes on the Blu-ray bear out by including multiple alternate versions of scenes that indicate more than usual indecision on the filmmakers’ part (only two of the scenes are remotely worthwhile, one using a bottle of pop to explain the rationale behind the experiment, the other a throwaway suggestion that ‘Evey’ is the manifestation of the researchers’ diseased minds rather than their patient’s). It’s little wonder that this sat on the shelf for two years before being released and quickly and quietly forgotten.