The Ghosts of Borley Rectory

The most haunted house in England burned down before WWII. Until then it had the scariest rep in town. A team shows up in the 30s for a six-month stint at getting to the roots of the hauntings. This was better than expected. It held me and even shivered me timbers on occasion.

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.

...if only for Toyah Wilcox. Honestly, terrible, slow-paced tale of a "scientist" trying to find evidence of ghosts. There are, it has to be said, some terrible acting performances, and if the stilted dialogue is representative of pre-war Britain, then I'm surprised we got anything done.

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.

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.