Butler's Cinema Scene

“GHOST STORIES”  My rating:  C (Opens May 5 at the Screenland Armour)

“Ghost Stories” is a three-part Brit feature that starts out with a bone-chilling bang and then gradually loses much of its mojo.

Inspired, one imagines, by the classic 1945  horror anthology “Dead of Night” (or the more recent “Creepshow”),  this effort from the writing/directing duo of Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman (who originally mounted it as a successful stage production) offers three horror short stories wrapped in a framing device.

To the extent that the film has a central character it is Philip Goodman (Nyman), a rumpled professor whose TV program examines supernatural events.  Goodman takes almost sadistic pleasure in exposing these claims as the result of human gullibility (“The brain sees what it wants to see”) and/or outright deception.

Then he’s contacted by Cameron, who back in the ’70s did his own share of psychic debunking. Goodman has long regarded Cameron as a role model and is disturbed when the aged fellow admits that thanks to three perplexing cases he’s now a believer. He challenges Goodman to try to solve them.

The first — and by far the best — yarn-within-a-yarn involves a former security guard (Paul Whitehouse) with a tragic past now enjoying an alcoholic retirement.  The night watchman relates to Goodman — we see it as a flashback — the night he experienced creepy things in the long-abandoned mental institution where he was posted. The segment is massively creepy and features a couple of shock effects that will make the hair on your arms stand up and take notice.

In the second story a young man (Alex Loather) motoring through a foggy forest has a hit-and-run incident with some sort of demonic creature.

And in the third segment Goodman visits a fellow (Martin Freeman, the only “name” in the cast) with poltergeist issues.

The big “gotcha” in Nyman and Dyson’s screenplay comes in the surrounding story, which delves into a tortured incident from Goodman’s own boyhood and shows him to be the subject of a cruel conspiracy.  By that time, though, “Ghost Stories” has bitten off more than it can comfortably gnaw.

Still, the film has been very well made and acted.  Connoisseurs of horror will find much to satisfy.

| Robert W. Butler