Hampshire

I'm a big horror fan, which is a genre where there's many misses and the hits are few and far between. I never came across a ghost story that captured my interest.

I found this on Netflix, and thought I'd give this a try even though it's about ghosts. So I expected a lot of loud noises and quick movements, which are there. What isn't there is the slow drawn out same old same old i.e. moving furniture and being generally more annoying than scary. This is just a story of a place that you don't want to go. Where there are things you don't want to see, and if you survive, who's to say that the torment will end. I give it 8/10, as far a a movie goes. But for it's genre and type of movie in the genre it's one of the best.

I, too, went into this movie after reading that first review below. I hadn't been able to find any other reviews here or on rottentomatoes (somehow missed the other one-star review here) and honestly, I'm pretty desperate for any horror movie I haven't seen lately. That glowing review must have been written by the filmmaker himself, or someone who's never seen a movie before. The dialog was terrible, the characters static and bland, their motivation purely to drive the script forward with no sense of believability, and the film effects were just tiring after a while--too shaky and definitely annoying in the "old film static" of the flashbacks. The music didn't fit nearly any scene either--where there should have been tension, there was blasting music. I give two stars because I found about 1/3 of the effects and ghost scenes actually creepy, which is more than some movies manage for me. The other 2/3 were unfortunately laughable. All in all, far more things wrong than right. The spark of potential is probably enough only for hard-core ghost story fans who've been through every other haunting movie.

I was really pleasantly surprised by this, given its low budget and obscurity (and some pretty negative reviews, to boot).

It's a very ambitious and heavily stylized ghost story, which depends a lot on darkness and/or obscured vision (be warned!), as well as its classical-music soundtrack, in order to convey its atmosphere. It can be eye-rollingly over the top at times, but when it works, it works very well.

It's far from perfect, I will say; I can put up with the scares that don't quite come off (there's a sequence with snakes and spiders that is more silly than scary, for example), as that's almost an inevitability of low-budget film. Instead, most of the problems I had were with characters just not acting in believable ways - most egregious was probably the entire character of Kreese, who was poorly written and maybe as a result not terribly well acted. (Hint: if you ever have a restaurant manager aggressively verbally assault customers because he didn't hear them come in, you should fire that manager immediately.) But overall, I really did like this. I'll admit I'm prejudiced, because this is a kind of film I really love: the Bad Place movie. We don't need to understand the logic of the Bad Place, all we need to know is that it eats people, and has a voracious appetite. I only ever cared much about one of the characters (Matt, who gets kind of a cool backstory/history), but I cared a lot about how scary the place was. The logic of the film overall is sketchy in places and just plain bizarre in others, but the surreal nature of what happens in and around the Bad Place is part of what ultimately made this effective for me.

Your mileage may vary.

I've bumped it, because of the freshness value and focus value. Quite a fresh look at a 'haunting' B-Grade Indie movie. It's different from the formulaic movie script with it's multiple involvements of people involved in the haunting. Likewise it stole my focus, which is what I point out as a 'focus value'. I was gaming and put this on in the background to 'realize my full value from netflix', but it stole my focus from the game to the movie. I had to see what was coming. It edged on corny at times, but didn't jump into that field. Hampshire has just enough of a difference to warrant watching. I enjoyed it, which for Netflix stream, is a positive in itself. Thanks for the product guys! Had an enjoyable time.