Lesperance does get a mild degree of atmosphere in in some of the scenes with the ghost girl appearing in the background of shots, a chair rocking all on its own or Chelsea Gilligan’s being massaged under her bedshirt while she sleeps despite nobody else being there.Ĭertainly, the sleep apnoea twist that comes in mid-film takes everything in an unexpected directions. The central premise of the old man afraid to go outdoors is a novel one the addition of a couple of parapsychologists who have been secretly stationed next door without his knowledge is a somewhat more incredible twist to buy. The sheer volume of numbers has caused them to slip into tired formula where you start to feel that almost all of the moves and directorial jumps are played out and each successive entry is just repeating the same thing ad nauseum.įor the most part, Norman Lesperanace seems to be doing exactly the same thing as all these others. They are produced by the truckload for the dvd and cable market. I have seen a large number of haunted house and ghost stories in the last few years. The film was retitled Door to the Other Side and has been more widely known under that name. Lesperance’s only credit before this was as co-director of Future Murder (2000), which has the distinction of being the first film of Andre øvredal of The Troll Hunter (2010) fame. Worth checking out if you come across it (as opposed to seeking out), The Lighthouse Keeper is a modest scare-fest which channels the neurotic introspection Poe brought to the likes Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum without bringing anything new to the creaky old table.Reclusion was a solo directorial debut for Norman Lesperance. In the end, you can sort-of believe this is the tale Poe might have told had he stayed sane that mad October night, although the final scene’s familiar narrative rug-pull will either have you grinning or groaning in recognition. It really gets silly in the final destruction of the lighthouse, which looks like an end-of-week assignment at an After Effects for Beginners course. What really lets it down is some appalling CGI whenever we see the lighthouse on the cliff and during the zombie attacks when bits of them fall off and start glowing for some reason or other. The trio of leads are all on-message with the material with Wells in particular manfully wrestling down the portentous, Poe-esque dialogue and coming up smelling of (dead) roses.Īnd it’s zombies, of course, which come in the dark, with some excellent make-up effects for the very low budget. This is a decent little horror flick that knowingly riffs on the ripe melodrama of the classic Roger Corman American International Poe features while also bringing, with its seaside atmospherics, a distinct whiff of the various coastal-set MR James horror tales the BBC has made over the years. He awakes in the custody of Wez from The Road Warrior (Vernon Wells) who tells him in his best Liam Neeson growl that there is no mystery woman, the two of them are alone in his desolate, crumbling lighthouse and whatever he does, to never let the candles go out… Spying an alluring mystery woman (Rachel Riley – no not that one) on the shore, he follows her up a dangerous cliff-face only to fall back down, narrowly avoiding getting his face flayed off by the jagged rock, Lucio Fulci-style. Quite what he thinks he’s playing at trying to solo row there in the open sea is never explained but he’s clearly not the full shilling. (Matt O’Neill) is boat-wrecked on a lonely peninsular en route to San Francisco. Was the tale of the Lighthouse Keeper an odyssey too far into the mouth of madness?įloppy-haired traveller J.P. It was one hell of an appropriate sign off, but the mystery doesn’t end there, because the book he was drafting at the time seemed to be an ominous portent to this strange exit. Reportedly, Eddie’s last words were, “Lord, help my poor soul”. On October 3rd 1849, Edgar Allan Poe, that legendary master of gothic mystery and horror, was found stumbling about the streets of Baltimore wearing clothes that were not his, gibbering feverishly about something we know not what, because he never regained coherence before buying the farm in the early hours of Sunday 5th October.
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