“THE WOMAN IN BLACK” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Feb. 3)
95 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
“THE INNKEEPERS” My rating: C+ (Opening at the Screenland Crossroads on Feb. 3)
100 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The problem with most ghost movies is that they fall apart in the clutch.
Oh, there are a few, like Robert Wise’s “The Haunting,” that set the hook early and never let you shake it off.
But most movies in the genre end up delivering a few goosebumps and then run aground on the rocks of their own illogical premises.
Two new spookfests have opened simultaneously in Kansas City, one your traditional Victorian haunter, the other a vaguely hip modern interpretation. Oddly enough, in both cases the wandering spirit making life miserable for the living is a wronged woman.
Perhaps the makers of ghost stories have a misogynistic streak. Discuss among yourselves.
Daniel Radcliffe...chasing ghosts
The more elaborate of the two productions is “The Woman in Black” starring Daniel Radcliffe (that’s right, Harry Potter) as a widowed lawyer. The time is the turn of the last century (noisy automobiles are beginning to show up even in remote English towns) and our hero, Arthur Kipps, has journeyed to a small coastal burg to settle the estate of a wealthy old woman whose large and largely rundown home sits on an island cut off from the mainland with each high tide.
Arthur is a sad, morose fellow perpetually in mourning for the wife who died in childbirth and left him with a young son back in London. He has his hands full with the locals, who refuse to rent him a room at the local inn, decline to take him out to the island estate, and even try to block roads to prevent access.
The local gentry (Ciaran Hinds), a rationalist with a mad wife (Oscar nominee Janet McTeer) and contempt for the peasants’ superstitions, befriends the young stranger and facilitates his entry to the mouldering mansion.
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