The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)

Pretty Good

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

I have not read the book, but did see in reviews that the little daughter is named Callie. The family name is Caleigh. Is there a reason for that repeated name?I liked the series, but I also thought it was a bit improbable--maybe that's what the genre calls for. I did appreciate that the parents were supportive of each other after losing a child. Also, why did they show the little boy being carried off and, at the conclusion, learn that he drowned. There was no real resolution that he was abducted and who did this. While I am complaining, the rescue scene with the father running all over the place did create tension, but it was quite over the top, I thought.

The Secret of Crickley Hall is a clichéd but creepy Haunted House story.Eve (Suranne Jones) and her husband Gabe (Tom Ellis) to move to a house in the country with teenage daughter Loren (Maisie Williams) for a short time some months after their young son went missing.Crickley Hall past the village of Devil's Cleave harbours its own secrets. An orphanage in the past, we learn via flashbacks to 1943 when it was run by the cruel and sadistic Augustus Cribben (Douglas Henshall) and his sister Magda (Sarah Smart). The orphans lived in dread.Eve hopes that Crickley Hall will heal their grieving but its dark past brings it own haunts and there is a malevolent presence.The opening episode certainly showed a lot of promise and creepiness but the subsequent episodes started to get silly and the plot more hokey. Suranne Jones is very effective as the grieving mother and there was a lot of melancholy with the climax but the series never excelled.

Someone once said of Frank Sinatra that he would do anything for money. I can only assume that this description applies to the group of mainly excellent actors who performed in this grubby little story.The rather tenuous connection between the loss of her own child apparently set off the sequence of events that took us back to the grisly happening in Crickley Hall many years ago. Flashbacks were on the whole handled clumsily, the supposed frightening occurrences were mostly ridiculous, rather than frightening (as I assume they were supposed to be) and it became increasingly difficult to understand who was who (in both the past and present). Although I now wish that I had followed my initial instinct and given up on it after the first episode, I stayed to the messy end and not for one moment did I feel scared/frightened (as I suppose the writers intended) - but disgusted that anyone should write such tripe (presumably for entertainment's sake). When it was over I was left with the thought that at least it kept people in work - but I would have very much liked to see their talents deployed elsewhere.

This is an appalling BBC mini-series, commissioned by the usual oafs and morons there who are overpaid and 'outtacontrol'. The series concerns the savage physical abuse of children by sadists. Really, is there no limit to the perversities shown on the BBC these days? This series should absolutely not have been made. It is offensive and revolting. I will however compliment the performance of the young actress Olivia Cooke, who plays the character Nancy, and hope that she never has to appear in anything as terrible as this series ever again. Some of the casting is however so uninspired that some of the bad talent to be seen in this series was appropriately dumped into this rubbish bin.