steve-390-291391

The official definition of what constitutes a poltergeist would run something like this"a spirit believed to manifest its presence by rappings and other noises and also by acts of mischief, such as throwing furniture about". Within four minutes of the start I was already hoping that a wardrobe would fly across the room and scythe through the entire cast. I hope for their sakes that none of them EVER watch this film that they performed in as it would surely drive them to at least self-harm. The presence of Leslie Nielsen, God bless him, would surely have rescued this awful, awful attempt to scare us. My fascination with how dreadful it was grew at an almost exponential rate with each passing minute. The wooden policeman obviously failed his zombie night-class exam and they just told him to audition for any film that requires a semi-animated lamppost. One line in the film chilled me into thinking that the worse-case scenario was about to happen. What if there was going to be a 20 minute intermission without the possibility of a toilet break or even an ice-cream? What if the second half of the film then resumed running backwards to the beginning with people ascending stairs facing the wrong way and regurgitating chewed-up burgers from their mouths and reassembling the whole on their barbecue plates? That would have really spooked me. Mercifully the director had some shred of compassion for his(surely)captive audience and limited this travesty to a mere 71 minutes including credits, which is in this case is an ironic misnomer of the first order. The stampede for the exit will result in multiple casualties. You have been warned.....

An exciting new twist on the tale. The directorial debut of Rupert Sanders promises much for the future and I, for one, wish him well in that and will look out for more of the same from him. The cgi was ably put into a supporting role here(with a few notable exceptions of course!)and was not allowed to swamp the character driven theme of the story. Mercifully we had absolutely no ninja-style antics from anyone and the fight scenes were raw and realistic.

Clichés were avoided by and large. Snow White was, and remained, an independent character throughout the story and the ending seemed to suggest that there were even greater choices for her to make in the future. Perhaps the studio will want to run with this again and invent a whole new sequel.

The temptation to inject humour into this movie was mercifully avoided. Just the odd line here and there, but almost unnoticed in the general flow of the story towards its climax. That gets 2 out of my 8 from 10 as I have seen too many dark plots spoiled by throwing in Tom and Jerry antics.All the cast were good to excellent and I liked Sam Spruell as Finn particularly