20150519: Horror Review--Altar

Altar

1. Fundamentals.
1. Title: Altar
2. Original Title: The Haunting of Radcliffe House
3. IMDb: Users rated this 6.2/10 (2,811 votes)
4. Rotten Tomatoes:
   critics rating not found number of reviews too low
   70% of 346 RT users rated this 3.5/5.0 or higher
   Critics Consensus: none available at review time.


5. Status: Released
6. Release date: 2014-12-27
7. Production Companies: Screen Yorkshire, Content Media Corp., Great Point Media, Pygmalion Productions
8. Tagline: No tagline found.


9. Budget:  Budget estimate not available at review time.
10. Revenue: Revenue figures not available at review time.
11. Runtime: 89 minutes.
12. Genres: Horror, Mystery


13. Written and directed by: Nick Willing.


14. Starring: Olivia Williams as Meg, Matthew Modine as Alec, Antonia Clarke as Penny, Steve Oram as Nigel Lean, Adam Thomas Wright as Harper, Richard Dillane as Greg, Rebecca Calder as Isabella, Jonathan Jaynes as Sean Donnelly


15. TMDb overview: A young family finds themselves in serious danger when they move to an isolated haunted house in the Yorkshire Moors.


2. Setup and Plot


1. Husband Alec Hamilton, wife Meg, daughter Penny, and son Harper move to a large fixer-upper in the Yorkshire countryside.  Meg has a contract to restore the house to its original state.  Alec is an artist, perhaps separated from his muse.  Meg hopes he can work well at the new location.  


2. Dust, no telephone signal to speak of, no running water, and it's cold.  Nice start.  Early on Alec and Meg force their way into a room that is not in the building's plans.  As per horror cliche, the principal characters do not notice when they unintentionally make a blood sacrifice in just the wrong place.  The viewers though, gets their noses rubbed in it.


3. Meg is skilled in restoration, but loses her London team through accident and scheduling.  She manages to interest a local builder, Sean Donnelly, to help her on a part time basis.


4. Then the ghostly signs start showing up, and things get more difficult for the family.


3. Conclusions


1. Reminds me a bit of The Shining (1980), but the stakes are not as high, the scares are weaker, and the sense of terrible isolation is almost absent.


2. It seems to me that the director blocked out the big stones in the plot before filming, but did not smooth out the transitions from one large plot point to the next.


3. One line summary: Good production values, but the screenplay is too weak.


4. Six of ten


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 A bit too dark for my tastes, but has wonderful framing, focus, and set design.


2. Sound: 8/10 Well recorded and nicely atmospheric.


3. Acting: 9/10 No complaints here.  All the cast did well.


4. Screenplay: 2/10 Hmph.  Bland and beautiful.  The pacing is a bit slow, the building of dramatic tension is weak, and the execution is short on scares.  For descriptions of the logical pitfalls in the script, perhaps try the reviews on IMDb.