negativec07

The Haunting of Bly Manor starts extremely strongly. The first two episodes are full of subtle camera work and background detail that really build that sense of unease and dread. Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious they don't have enough story to fill a 9 hour runtime. There are so many storylines that often take up entire episodes and have absolutely no bearing on the ending. Without going into spoilers, we get the back stories of every single character, and only two of them are relevant. There are also plot details that are dropped completely and just never mentioned again.

Another quite distracting point is that the series is supposedly set in 1980's England, but feels nothing like it. Half the characters speak and dress as if they're from the 50's, the other half from the present day. The accents are pretty poor as well, with one character constantly switching from American to Irish. Slow burn horror can be incredibly effective, but there is a big difference between building suspense and wasting time, with Bly Manor very much falling into the latter.

Even as a big fan of the games, and the 2005 film being a guilty pleasure, I went into this with absolutely zero expectations given its almost universally negative reception. Whilst this is by no means a good film, it ended up being surprisingly better than I was expecting. The plot generally follows the games, where scientists on Mars' Phobos moon create a teleporter that unwittingly allows an army (well, 3 or 4) demons through. A small military squad gets sent to investigate, you can guess the rest.

The effects and cgi aren't too bad considering the very limited budget, but the props and scenery are where the cheapness really shows through. It's very obvious that they only had 1 monster suit, about 5 people playing zombies and 3 sets, which they use multiple times with different lighting. The guns look like they're made of plastic and the uniforms are like something from a paintball game. But despite it's many, many problems, it does at least feel like they tried with what little resources they had. There are a fair few references to the game, some which work and some that feel completely shoehorned in (such as the "I'm your ultra nightmare" line). Ultimately though it kept me reasonably entertained for 90 minutes, so can't really ask for more than that.