The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
DVD & BluRay
CAMPTON MANOR High Fliers, cert 15; DVD £7.99 & on Digital
Ghost stories often have plots as easy to see through as the apparitions that insist on haunting creepy old houses.
This one - a bit like Nicole Kidman’s classic The Others which has a cunning twist might keep you both amused and guessing at times. And of course the confined nature of a haunted house story can help budget-wise if you aren’t going in for elaborate CGI effects, and Canadian director Cat Hostick wisely avoids all that.
The movie’s set in the 1950s and stars Shawn Roberts (pictured) as novelist and spiritualist Teddy who is about to experience the downside of being able to talk to the dead when Jack (Jason London) - who it turns out has a dark secret of his own - repeatedly turns up at Teddy’s office and finally pesters him into investigating events that took place at Campton Manor in 1922 when 28 guests at a New Year’s Eve party all died of heart attacks.
This obviously wasn’t the ending anybody expected to a good night out!. When the pair visit the deserted old pile and find a door open, Teddy ventures through the darkened rooms and suddenly finds himself back at the house on that fateful night in the 20s.
The host Lawrence Campton (Kenneth Welsh) has even been expecting him. In fact everyone seems to know him. Ooo-er! How can this be?
By now you’ll be wondering if Teddy is one of the living, or like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, is he one of the dead investigating his own demise. Just don’t expect gore and flashy effects in this ghostly tale.