Ho-Hum, Haunted House, Vengeful Spirit, Who Cares?

Rating: 4/10 (8 February 2012)

The Woman in Black (1:35, PG-13) — fantasy: supernatural, 3rd string, formula
The Woman in Black is a standard haunted-house story (bereaved mother seeking vengeance for her dead child from beyond the grave), in this case with almost no dialog, just poor Daniel Radcliffe (as pre-WW1 solicitor Arthur Kipps) walking around said house looking grim.
During the course of the movie Radcliffe displays between about 0 and 2 days worth of Nixonian 5 o'clock shadow, not monotonically increasing, as one would expect, but rather coming and going to the point where I was spending more time watching that than paying attention to the plot. Really bad continuity here, making you wonder why they didn't think this thru in advance, or at a minimum clean it up in post. Also way too many cheap-thrill scenes that were more "Ho-hum, what, again?" than frightening.
What did it have going for it? An interesting setting, at big old dark Eel Marsh House, on a promontory accessible only via a causeway during low tide. Effective atmospherics. Lots of work for the foley artists. A nice non-existent twist when local burgher and ostensible skeptic Samuel Daily (Ciarán Hinds) DOESN'T turn out to be some kind of secretly malevolent deceiver but is instead genuinely friendly and helpful.
Opposed to this are the dreariness, almost complete absence of any cast or dialog, over-familiar premise, and my standard lament about all such movies, namely that they may tell us WHY the evil spirit is doing the wicked deeds, but they never show us HOW.
It's a sad commentary on the film when you find yourself thinking "OK, if you want to kill off all the kids in the village, just do it and be done with it!", but such is the impatience engendered by the petulant, dithering deader that I was hoping she'd finally get it over with so I could click my stopwatch off and bail out of the theater.
All of this combines to barely put The Woman in Black into the "up to you" range if you like this kind of thing.