Released: January 2nd,
2015
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Relativity Media
Starring: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory,
Oaklee Pendergast, Leanne Best
Directed by: Tom Harper
Written by: Jon Croker
Personal Bias Alert: didn’t see the first Woman in Black,
went in cautiously optimistic
4.5 of 10
I
know, I know, I shouldn’t have been optimistic.
It’s an early January horror film sequel blah blah blah. But I heard good things about the original,
and I want to see Hammer (the main production company for this film) succeed and
start making gothic horror again. Angel of Death does tread closer to the
gothic style I like than most modern horror films, but it also relies heavily
on modern horror clichés that I find tiresome.
This made for a film that was tantalizingly close to being good but
always let me down, even in its waning moments.
There
is one excellent aspect of this film, and that’s the lead performance by Phoebe
Fox. Even as all the crazy horror stuff
was swirling around her, I believed her portrait of a resilient young
schoolteacher in WWII England. She cares
about the children, tries to do what’s best for them, but understandably isn’t
too jazzed about going off to some isolated house in the middle of a
marsh. Luckily for her, a young soldier (Jeremy
Irvine) stationed nearby takes a shining to her, providing some bright spots in
her otherwise dreary days. Irvine and
Fox have good chemistry together, and when they weren’t doing ghost stuff I quite
liked their story. Fox certainly handles
the less-than-stellar material better than Irvine, but their performances both
stick out as better than the film itself.
Irvine’s
character, Harry, is actually pretty indicative of the narrative aspirations
and flaws of Angel of Death. Setting your story during the blitz of WWII
gives the writer a lot to play with, and Harry and the other characters carry potentially
interesting burdens related to the war. There’s
even attempts to interweave these into the narrative, but unfortunately, they never
quite seemed natural. There’s always the
feeling of the writer pushing them to work, stretching the ideas a bit too thin
or a bit too forcefully. I found myself
appreciating the attempt, especially since many horror films don’t even bother
with such things, instead of appreciating the outcome.
As far as the actual horror goes, it’s
mostly manufactured, completely unrealistic jump scares. It’s the kind of lazy stuff where the shot is
extra wide and the music swells so you know something’s about to move in all that
empty space. That, or it’s the kind that
would never work if the movie’s world was actually real. For instance, one jump scare involves a POV
shot of a kid staring at the ceiling, then the music swells, then another kid pops
into frame and makes you jump a few inches out of your seat. The shot then cuts out wider, and we see the
kid that scared us straddling the kid lying on the bed. This means that in the movie’s world the kid
that scared us had to climb onto the bed before ever entering the POV shot we
were watching, in which case the POV kid would have known that the scare kid
was there and probably would’ve looked at him. This would make the steady POV shot we were
watching with the jump scare impossible.
It’s this kind of nonsensical crap in horror films that drives me nuts.
While
I’m riffing on the camerawork, I want to bring up how overly dark the shots
are. To be clear, I mean literally dark,
like murky and not well lit. There’s a
slim possibility that I was seeing a poor projection of the film, but I’ve
never had trouble with this theater before.
Assuming it was intentional, I’m really mystified as to why they shot it
this way. This is a film that relies on
things moving in the shadows, but the picture was so dark that half the time I
couldn’t make things out. It was so bad
that there were actually times where the shot was wide, the music swelled, then
we got the big clash of noise and the characters jumped and I didn’t see
anything. All indications were that the jump
scare was there, but the shot was just too dark for me to make it out. That is just sheer incompetence.
Yet
even with all these complaints, there were scenes that worked. The house and grounds were sufficiently
creepy and Fox was good at selling fear.
When the filmmakers let these elements play out, like in a great
sequence in the fog-drenched woods or the surprisingly effective climax, I was genuinely
creeped out. These elements of
old-school horror and the great performance by Fox came dangerously close to
overcoming the rest of the film’s lazy schlock, but the positives are
ultimately bogged down by the negatives.
Other Notes:
Ø To
be fair, for PG-13 horror this isn’t terrible.
Ø Unfortunately,
since its PG-13 you get to watch it in a theater filled with giggling
teenagers.
Ø At
least Jeremy Irvine has moved forward in time from War Horse’s WWI to Angel of
Death’s WWII.
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