Stimmen

Apparently, David Hemmings and Gayle Hunnicutt had a terrible marriage although mainly because of Hemmings with his womanising and drinking. Within the film the two actors are all at it again it is drawn from a one-act play and then opened up. They are imagining Don't Look Now or even Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Be something but certainly not and it doesn't even start of the dialogue being effective. A very half the way of a silly ghost story is all it is.

This movie is quite difficult to locate, which is a shame for horror fans. In the past couple of years, more sophisticated films such as "What Lies Beneath" and "The Sixth Sense" have been giving scary movies a good name. "Voices" is from this class of thriller because it achieves its shocks through the use of story and character interaction, with an ending that leaves you wondering and frightened for days. It is a simple story about a young British couple who want to get away for a short, romantic vacation in a secluded area of rural England. The destination is unfamiliar to both, and the journey there is ripe with dialogue so realistic and ordinary (plain conversation, arguments, reconciliations) that one might initially think "Voices" is an arty, ad-libbed drama as opposed to a horror flick. This mundane aspect is all a ploy to throw the viewer off, however. Once the young lovers find the vacation house, the mood shifts eerily and the sense of something threatening and supernatural surrounds the couple. They become frustrated, confused and hateful towards each other as their romantic weekend slips through their fingers amidst a haunting neither one can identify. The audience are left equally bewildered, because there is no standard, knife-wielding lunatic creeping outside,and there is no demon locked in the cellar. There is merely this sense of accelerating decline in the characters that is fascinating to observe, and we find ourselves needing to know what happened en route that has resulted in this bizarre situation. Ultimately, the final ten minutes of the film answers all of our questions and makes the subtleties we were puzzling over seem more profound...and the couple themselves discover it as we do, with just as much sense of terror.

Submitted by Penny Dreadful, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Is not enough to redeem it. Not by a long shot.

The Worst Parents In The World(TM) make love on a barge while allowing their little boy to wander off near a busy waterway... guess what happens next. Yep.

A brief estrangement later, the lady is released from a mental hospital to travel with her husband to a creepy mansion far off in the countryside, in the cold and the fog. She's inherited it from her aunt, who... you know what, it doesn't matter.

They eventually get there, and much boring conversation occurs between the traumatised wife and the uncaring hubby, interspersed by many failed attempts at him trying to seduce her and then she hears s-p-o-o-k-y voices in the background (hence the title, doh).

Honestly, you really don't want to watch this. Steer well clear. It's more like a play than a film anyway, with lots of dull dialogue on a single set and only a few outdoor scenes at the beginning and end. A play you'd walk out halfway through and demand your money back, that is.

The actors are both fine with what they're given to work with, although the lady's hysterical behaviour sometimes can be a tad OTT. The supernatural elements don't work at all, with only a brief peek now and then at the cause and when the 'Big Reveal' does eventually arrive, to say it will underwhelm you is to say the protagonists are dead certs for Mother And Father Of The Year.

Yes, I'm still upset about that. How can you leave your little son to toddle off to certain death, just because you fancy a bit of...?!

Anyway, the ending. Yes, if I'd really thought about it, I might've seen it coming... but I didn't and it sorta left an impact. Shame that the rest of the movie didn't compare to this shock denounment in any way, shape or form though... making it comparable to chewing a single mint after imbibing an entire bottle of cod liver oil.

A nice after snack, not nowhere near enough to take the nasty taste away. 3/10.

VOICES (1973) is a slice of British psychological horror that I wanted to enjoy far more than I actually did. It starts off on a strong footing, with an excellent set-piece that basically copies the opening of DON'T LOOK NOW, and it has a good ending - but it's that long hour in the middle which is the problem. This is based on a play and it shows, as it's all about a conversation between two people interspersed with some very mild spooky moments.

The ghostly material is almost timid and other than a Bavaesque moment, negligible. Real-life couple David Hemmings and Gayle Hunnicutt are both fine, particularly the latter, but they can't do much with such uninteresting characters. Plus TV director Kevin Billington doesn't seem to have any affinity with the genre. The sudden cutting from the filmed outdoor scenes to the videoed interiors is quite abrupt too, which makes this look rather cheap and grainy - like a reguar TV episode from the era.

Rather dreary British-made ghost story involves a bickering couple hoping to restart their marriage after a long period of mourning over the death of their child, who drowned while on a family outing at the lake. The wife, who later slashed her wrists and was institutionalized, blames herself and her husband for their son's accident (they were making love instead of watching him), while the husband feels the past is dead and it's time to move on. After the wife inherits her aunt's isolated estate, the shaky twosome drive out to the fog-enshrouded countryside to spend some time together, but she is unnerved from the moment they arrive--and is alone in hearing a child's giggle coming from the next room. Quite obviously adapted from a play, this talk-heavy piece hits an early wall in the first act with the husband (David Hemmings) making numerous attempts to warm up his spouse (Gayle Hunnicutt), while she alternately invites his advances and pushes him away. The material might have been more tolerable if the set wasn't such a gloomy eyesore--and if Hunnicutt's character wasn't so impossibly mercurial. For those who stick with it, there's a plot twist in Act Three that is successfully pulled off, although it renders much of the rest of the picture pointless. George Kirgo and Robert Enders (also the producer) adapted Richard Lortz's play, which ran on Broadway for a scant eight performances. ** from ****