The Woman In Black (2012)

..oh don't look at me like that, nothing came out this weekend. I've really wanted to see this movie but I haven't had a chance until now. Live with it. 

   Women In Black is one of many many many many many many horror movies that will probably be enjoyed and forgotten with time. Hell i just walked out of it and I'm already having trouble remembering the main character's name (Harry Potter. They should have just stuck with that). While not a bad movie nothing about it really stands out and it falls into a list of many other horror movies that have the same problems; Pacing, tension, and actually being scary. 


   The movie starts off way too slow giving us a ton of useless information about the main character, then trying to explain all the useless information that most of the audience probably understood just fine. We don't actually get to see or go into the spooky haunted house *SPOILER ALERT* Its about a spooky haunted house in the middle of no where northern England* until almost half an hour in. The character's reasons for going to the house in the first place aren't explained in a way that makes it seem vital (Another case of amateur directors trying to tell us things instead of showing them to us). When he finally gets into the house it looks way smaller on the inside then it did on the outside which broke the setting for me a bit, even if they had used the excuse that he just didn't want to explore the whole house they should have made more of an effort to make it feel as big in scary on the inside as it looked on the outside. 


   From then on the movie speeds up and never slows down, the plot gets revealed in chunks that are like simple little mysteries and aren't very hard to predict and it runs all the way to the end leaving what i thought was going to be slow atmosphere building in the dust. The problem with the way the story moves along is that the amateurish horror directing misses key opportunities to be genuinely scary, instead going the lame route and stuffing in cheap little jump scares that for the most part wouldn't mar the jumpiest frightened cats. That ends up being the movies second main problem, whether its the fault of the director or the editor is unclear but neither of them seemed to know which scenes were tense or creepy. The jump scares are often thrown in after all the tension is lost, or before new tensions are about to come up and they have little effect. The last couple scenes in the movie do their best to make up for this but fall short becuase of the pacing. 


   Which at the end is absolutely snooker loopy, I think i counted four failed attempts at a climax, each getting more and more ridiculous until the movie just put itself out of it's misery with an overly sentimental ending that would have been affecting if it hadn't been so bluntly hinted at the entire movie. 


   Overall the movie just failed to scare, which is made even worse by all the potential it squandered. Daniel Radcliffe was totally believable and i feel like he could still have a big acting career. A lot of the minor characters are played by talented British sit com stars and make their scenes feel very real, all the sets in cinematography were actually really good for this kinda movie and I was very pleased during shots of the village and the house and the marshes and all that. The film even makes a concerted effort to have some dark and twisted psychological stuff, but it never amounts to much. 


   All and all i guess it wasn't all bad, it wasn't too long and had a lot of cool ideas, but the damn thing just wasn't that scary. And the pacing was just so strange. I can't really recommend it but even if i did, you won't be remembering this movie even a month down the road. 


Harry Potter gets a D+ for not being able to cast a spell that scared me in the slightest.