A Ride on a Ghost Train

Rating: 3/10 (26 July 2012)

I had been really looking forward to seeing this film. I had read the reviews in the newspapers which generally said that Daniel Radcliffe's acting was wooden but that this didn't really detract from the good 'haunted house' story. Now, having seen the film on DVD, I am really disappointed. This may have worked reasonably well as a 3D film in a simulator cinema at a theme park, or as part of a ghost train ride, but it is otherwise very weak. The scary bits all come from things popping out and the soundtrack gets louder so that the noise of something suddenly moving makes you jump. The pace is incredibly slow and there is no character development so you don't care what happens to anyone. Daniel Radcliffe is undoubtedly a very handsome young man who looks splendid in his period costume, but he was much too young to play the father of a four year old child and his acting was not wooden, it was non-existent. I felt that the supporting cast were having to hold back so that they did not upstage him. He seems like a charming, intelligent, gorgeous person, but I cannot understand how he has managed to make so much money from acting.
The cast and director of this film should have watched the wonderful Nicole Kidman and her superb supporting cast in The Others to see what a really frightening film should be like. Stanley Kubrick used brilliant actors whom he directed with a rod of iron to achieve a film so scary that the mere appearance of two smartly dressed young girls in front of a little boy in The Shining remains an iconic image of terror - one of many from that film. Whilst I didn't expect anything of the Stanley Kubrick calibre, The Woman in Black is well worthy of its 12 certificate rating, because anyone over that age would find it extremely dull.