The Haunting Of Margam Castle (2020)
“Five American parapsychologists travel to Wales to investigate paranormal activity in the reputedly haunted Margam Castle”
Another one from the Andrew Jones / Northbank Entertainment production line. It’s the usual low budget dog’s dinner of pastiche and quasi-plagiarism, this time with an extra abundance of ‘homage’ elements alluding to earlier and better genre films –thematically and plotwise to The Haunting and Legend Of Hell House, obviously, also Burnt Offerings, The Woman In Black, Witchfinder General, the Amityville franchise; musically to the early Universal horror theme (Swan Lake, here played on a music box, an artefact which appears in several of the director’s films), Amicus’ Asylum (Night On Bald Mountain), Bride Of Frankenstein et al (Ave Maria, listed in the closing credits as “Ava Maria”). The ‘haunted phonograph’ plays the 1913 recording In The Evening By The Moonlight performed by the Haydn Quartet – previously heard in Jones’ 2015 film A Haunting At The Rectory) . Moonlight Sonata also gets a hearing.
The director has managed to involve some veteran performers in the cast, notably Derren Nesbitt and Jane Merrow, plus a short cameo by Caroline Munro and an even shorter one by Judy Matheson, in an attempt to appeal to the fanbase.
The Haunting Of Margam Castle is a cut above most of Jones’ previous output, although that’s about as faint as praise gets. The improvement is noticeable in the location work – it would be hard not to shoot a visually atmospheric film in the magnificent titular castle – and in a slightly tighter paced script with a touch less padding than is customary for Northbank. To their credit, the makers do manage to rustle up some moments of unwholesome angst and creepy atmosphere (without recourse to graphic violence and gore), there is a slow but sure narrative progression (despite plot diversions managing to incorporate Pendle Hill, Matthew Hopkins and John Sterne – a scene of Merrow at the stake mirrors the one with Matheson in Hammer’s 1971 Twins Of Evil - and Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). Through it all, Nesbitt and Merrow add gravitas.
Having said that, many of the shortcomings common to the director’s previous films (and cheap indie productions in general) are present here – excessive scenes of two people having drawn out conversations in a room, clumsily written and badly delivered dialogues, terrible fake accents, poor editing, little to no character development, rudimentary camerawork, minimum action and hackneyed ‘shock effects’.
Even cutting plenty of slack for limited resources, there are too many shoddy, avoidable missteps that pull the viewer out of the story. Some examples; an emminent scientist uses the word ‘phenomenon’ as a plural; a kitchen in New York has British style power sockets; two Americans talk about a ‘waistcoat’; ‘local’people in a pub warn the investigators not to go near the castle – which is so far away from the pub that they have to take the motorway to get there; a character is suddenly dragged through a door and instantly the team leader says ‘Leave her, she’s gone’; the medium explains the origins of the various ghosts haunting the castle (each shown in flashbacks) just by sitting at a table - and is even able to divine the existence of a secret subterranean vault which ‘harbours a dark secret’; said dark secret is a copy of the aforementioned Necronomicon, which has a convenient (Christian!) incantation for ridding the castle of the spirits of the dead….
If they keep up their current prouction schedule (seventeen films completed in seven years), in quantity, Northbank will be fast approaching Hammer. In quality they have yet to reach Full Moon.