The Ghosts of Borley Rectory

What is it with the British film industry these days, it has really gone downhill if this is the level of filmmaking that we are left with!

Dreadfully, dreadfully dull, terrible acting from nearly the whole cast; the guy who used to be in the bill trying to do a country yokel has to be seen and heard to be believed (or perhaps not), waffling script with some truly, truly, stilted dialogue, no real scares, dreadful shaky camerawork.

It is based on the true story of the most haunted house in the UK and the old story of the nun who was bricked up in the walls for having an affair with a Monk in the local monastery, which was eventually found to be a whole load of fakery as was Mr Hill himself, so there is very little you can really use to make a film out of; perhaps a 30 min short but to see good actors like Julian Sands and others waste their time in this is cringeworthy - they must really be hard up for the cash these days!

The production company behind this film is the very definition of quantity over quality. As of Oct 2021, the director has 10 films in pre-production, film or post, with 3 out in 2021, and there are only 2 months of 2021 left.

This is a bad film, badly written, badly directed and badly shot, very similar to all their other films which can been seen on streaming sites. Funny for all the wrong reasons.

Avoid, don't waste your time.

When will they ever learn?

I mean, when will they learn anything about filmmaking?

I should have guessed by the over the top "Production Company" titles, followed by the numbingly endless actual titles, that this was going to end badly.

Still, I wasn't disappointed by my own prediction, so that deserves, at best, one grudgingly appointed star.

But please, don't let this talentless twit direct anything ever again.

Spoiler alert : There is nothing left to spoil.

It isn't fair to judge this film as a genre ghost story, because it isn't. It's a retelling of real story from the 1920's and should be judged as such. As a based on a True Story tell it reasonably recreates the story as told in the papers of the time. There have been a number of films and TV plays retelling the story over the last few years and this is one of the better ones with good acting from Wilcox, Sands and Baker and some interesting photography and direction. So if you watching this in expectation of a 'The Conjuring' style story are going to be disappointed but if a story of another time when the people where recovering from the impacts of a mass casualty war with an attendant growth in belief in the supernatural then this will be of interest.

When I got the chance to sit down and watch "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" I did so immediately. Why? Well, first of all, the movie has Julian Sands on the cast list, and also it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen.

However, I only knew about "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" because I had seen it on Julian Sands IMDb list, but aside from that, then I had heard nothing about this movie. So I wasn't really sure what I was in for here, nor really knowing anything about it, aside from it being a horror movie.

Well, "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" wasn't really all that great of a movie. And even for a horror movie then its plot and storyline was fairly bland, if not actually downright generic. This was essentially just a run-of-the-mill haunted house movie, and not a particularly great one at that.

There was nothing scary to be seen in "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory", unless you are a rookie and a newcomer to the horror genre. For a seasoned veteran such as myself then "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory", as written by Christopher Jolley and Steven M. Smith, was a mere stroll in the park.

Visually then "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" wasn't particularly thrilling or great. There were a few special effects here and there, but they weren't on any noteworthy level, and came off merely as being watchable. So don't sit down to watch this movie with the intentions of seeing something amazing or super scary.

Director Steven M. Smith didn't really revolutionize the horror genre here with "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory", nor did he bring anything new or interesting to the haunted house subgenre.

The acting performances in "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" were bland. There wasn't any particular great performances here, and even Julian Sands seemed to run on auto-pilot, and he wasn't given all that much screen time anyway.

"The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" was not a horror movie that left me with any great impression, and it is one that will slowly fade into the mists of oblivion and I will never take another gander at it. Yeah, it was just that bland and mundane.

My rating of "The Ghosts of Borley Rectory" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.