Expect nothing more than you would from an average Hammer Horror from the 60s

Rating: 5/10 (5 March 2012)

I naively expected that a Hammer Horror film from the 21st century would be a step up from the low-budget affairs that bore this brand in the 1960s and 70s. While the film clearly has access to a larger budget than its predecessors it is essentially no better than an average vintage Hammer Horror.
Where Woman in Black differs in a positive way from earlier Hammer Horrors is in the relative authenticity of its period detail - it looks like a good quality BBC costume drama. I wrote "relative" because in one fundamental way is lacks authenticity to such an extent that I soon lost my ability to suspend disbelief - it is set in an isolated community in the north east of England, and yet judging by the accents of the villagers this is the one of the most multicultural isolated villages in the land. One of the main characters, a local landowner, speaks in an Irish accent for some inexplicable reason (yes, I know that the actor is Irish but he put on a good RP English accent when playing Julius Caesar in the Rome TV series). Perhaps I should also add that, accents notwithstanding, the quality of the supporting cast is quite high.
Where Woman in black very much follows on from the B-movie Hammer Horrors of the mid-twentieth century is in its formulaic approach to creating suspense and horror: very annoying use of loud noises as a cue for you when you should be scared, a mad and ugly villainess, villagers taken straight from Frankenstein etc.
And, finally, where the film fails to match up with Hammer classics is in the rather modest acting skills of its lead - Daniel Radcliffe still strikes me as having made his way to international stardom purely on the basis of looking like Harry Potter. Radcliffe's performance in Woman in Black is not bad. Indeed it is competent. But that is not good enough for a film with a very simple plot that unravels so slowly that whole minutes elapse with nothing more to entertain you than the visuals.