Boy, do I feel like I'm going to get into trouble for this review... Do you ever watch a film and don't enjoy it, only to go and see everyone else absolutely seemed to love it? Well, it looks like 'Fear in the Night' is going to be one of those films for me.
First of all, let me say that I love Hammer horror films, plus I'm a huge fan of Peter Cushine. Therefore, I was more than happy to invest my time into watching a film where a young woman gets attacked by a one-armed man the night before she moves to an old boys' boarding school in order to help her husband teach there.
That's the basic premise of the film. The cast isn't huge. You have the young couple (Ralph Bates and Judy Geeson), the headmaster of the school (the legendary Peter Cushine) and his young wife Joan Collins. Therefore, you'll probably have a reasonable idea who the attacker is (although possibly not why things are happening the way they are).
The cast is great and the premise, although nothing that special, is fine for a horror movie. However, what really got me was the amount of time spent simply wandering around from room to room in various buildings. The film is about an hour and a half long and at least half of that is spent watching a character walk about quietly. It's like the story should have only been about thirty minutes long and they had to find a way of padding it out to a full feature film's length.
In short, most of it was kind of dull. It wasn't until the very last part of the final act did things pick up enough to peak my interest. It's probably because of what happens when you find out what's really happening that the film has been given such a high score by many. And, I will agree that the ending is pretty good/clever, but it's just a shame you have to wade through so much boring 'filler' to get there.
If you're happy to watch something that is probably the slowest 'slow-burner' ever made in order to get to the good stuff then this is definitely for you. Now I know the outcome I really don't need to watch it again.
5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back
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