Altar

If you've seen a fair share of horror films, you can tick off not only the mash up of plot points but the composition of shots, camera tricks, and the musical flourishes.

The Legend of Hell House, The Amityville Horror, The Shining, The Haunting, Rose Red, Dead Again, Darkness, Burnt Offerings, Poltergeist, The Ninth Gate, etc. It's strange and weird enough, but the plot doesn't cohere and devolves into the straight to video mess it is.

By the time things turn a corner and the elder daughter starts to get rolled into the mix, it's like you're watching a new movie, as if they're trying to restart in the third reel. But that's the film in a nutshell, constantly restarting with a new conflict that sort of connects but not really.

It's always a warning sign when a film bypasses cinema release to go straight on TV, so when THE HAUNTING OF RADCLIFFE HOUSE (original title: ALTAR) appeared on UK TV on Boxing Day I knew something was up. And, unsurprisingly, it turns out to be very bad indeed: a complete rip-off of a film made by people with no understanding of how the ghost story genre works.

The film features a pair of past-it actors (Olivia Williams and Matthew Modine) as a married couple who move into a creepy old mansion in the Yorkshire moors with their bratty kids. Unsurprisingly, the place is haunted, and the haunting takes the most obvious route imaginable: dumb ghost scares ripped off from THE GRUDGE, a possession straight out of THE SHINING, and a myriad other scenes ripped off from elsewhere. When the film does try something new (like a ghostly encounter in broad daylight) it just falls flat.

The production values are acceptable here, but the level of cliché is just too high for it to be enjoyable. The grey filter cinematography has been done to death, the performances are shrill and histrionic (and Williams just CANNOT carry a movie) and the scares silly. Oddly, much of this seems to have been copied from an old favourite of mine, the '90s-era video horror game PHANTASMAGORIA, except without the fun factor. Throw in some dodgy historical rumblings and an equally dodgy cameo from SIGHTSEERS star Steve Oram and you have a complete train wreck of a movie. M. R. James would be spinning in his grave...

No, this is not great filmmaking.

(Must be a lot of cast and crew having rated this on here.)

Just going to ramble about this in no special order.

Some places it seems like they have used, I don't know, Adobe Premiere effects, or worse yet, effects that are in the camera itself.. Thats a little wtf, right?

As far as I can remember, one or two short scenes are almost creepy, actually. But they are way outweighed by what is wrong, and bad, and not creepy.

Olivia Williams is annoying as crap! She has the worst looking hair, and it is even a point in the movie! I got mad just looking at her stupid hair. That's not good.

There is nothing new here, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but what is here, is not done very good, and that's a bad thing.

The plot with the wife and the husband and the story of the house and the this and the that, could have been cool, but it is just not good enough.

One scene with a sculpture and some smashing is kind of cool. Best part of the movie.

Atmospheric haunted house horror about a designer who moves her husband and kids into a spooky Yorkshire manor she has been hired to restore. Beautifully shot on location, director/screenwriter Nick Willing makes the most of the subdued, wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors. I wish we had a better sense of the gorgeous house the family takes over -- for all the reliance on secret rooms and bricked up passageways, the internal layout of the house remains vague and generic. Also less defined than they should be are the couple's two children, who we don't get to know very well. This makes the peril they are in less compelling than it could be. Olivia Williams does a great job as the emotional center of the film, trying to hold her family together in the face of mounting financial pressures and a menacing presence that seems to grow more powerful. Like many such stories, the supernatural here is an expression of the resentments and strains that have crept into William's marriage to her failed artist husband, played by a miscast Matthew Modine. While it doesn't break any new ground, "Altar" builds and mostly maintains a high creepiness factor, especially when Modine discovers a new medium and new canvas for his art. This is a good, old-fashioned, restrained horror film, well worth checking out.

The Altar is a ghost story in the classic tradition. Meg (Olivia Williams), Alec (Matthew Modine) and their children move in to a decrepit Yorkshire mansion whilst Meg restores it for the owner. Over the next couple of months the haunted nature of the house becomes apparent, with the usual banging sounds, slamming doors and ethereal appearances. Most of the film relies heavily on Olivia Williams and she does an OK job, with Matthew Modine limping in towards the end.

Undoubtedly, the film borrows heavily from other ghost and spirit films, most notably The Shining, but it was almost like playing bingo, identifying tropes from other films as it progressed, such as The Exorcist, Don't Look Now, etc. The TV movie feel and austere feel of the grand old house give a 1970s drama feel to the film. Some may associated this with quality drama, some with cheap production values.

There are some plus points: the old Yorkshire mansion and it's windswept grounds give a good background feeling, and the explicit pictures of the ghosts is usual and scarier than most in the genre - more like The Grudge than Turn of the Screw.

Overall, I was left with the question, why? Did this movie really need to be made?