The Woman in Black: Back to Hammer

To be honest, I had pretty high expectations going into The Woman in Black, which stars ex-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe and is produced by Hammer films. It appeared to have the feel of the old Hammer films about haunted houses and monsters and that really drew me in.

However, these high expectations were unfortunately not met by The Woman in Black. The film is a remake of a 1989 Hammer film of the same name directed by Herbert Wise and starring Adrian Rawlings. It tells the story of a lawyer (Radcliffe) attempting to do all the final paperwork for a woman who died in a large, strange house in the middle of a swamp in rural England. When he arrives, the townspeople don't take kindly to him for a reason that is never really explained. Strange things begin to happen in the house and he soon hears a story about a woman who died there and allegedly haunts the place.

Despite having pretty cool visuals, The Woman in Black fell just short of being a decent horror film. The plot moved excruciatingly slow and failed to really capture my interest throughout. The plot was fairly predictable and generic, and didn't offer any detail that would've kept viewers on the edge of their seats. Most of the film just involved Radcliffe walking around and looking at things in the house and was ultimately fairly boring.

The Woman in Black also used a technique that I am never in favor of: cheap scares. This basically means that throughout the film there were multiple pop out scares that ended up adding absolutely nothing to the plot. A dog suddenly barking or some insignificant object falling over for no reason or a character entering a scene unexpectedly during a completely silent point in the film. The Woman in Black was chock full of these which greatly harmed the rest of the film because of how laughable and predictable each scare became.

They say you can't take a movie out of its time, however, the original Woman in Black was just as tasteless and boring so I'm not really sure why director James Watkins chose to create an equally uninteresting remake. This one is definitely a skip.