Another vacation watch on a tablet, another reason to be thankful for archive.org. I downloaded this spooky haunted house tale and checked it out late at night at a relative's house. And really, this was a good way to do it. The movie starts off pretty creepily, and being in a dark, strange house amped up the tension for me. There was honestly a couple of times where I'd see movement out of the corner of my eye and my heart would skip a beat - after a few minutes I figured out that passing car lights do funny things on the walls in that house. So that helped make a pretty mediocre haunted house flick a little bit better. So if you are going to see it - go into a stranger's house to do so.
It's nice to know that people have been making B-movie knockoffs for decades now. Ghosts of Hanley House is a pretty much a rip-off of the 1963 classic The Haunting (nowadays, it would have been called A Haunting and been released by the Asylum). In this case, 5 folks stay in the titular house based on a bet. Dick (the owner of the house) bets his friend Hank (I think?) that there are ghosts there - people have been saying strange things about the house since the Hanley couple upped and vanished one day without telling a soul. All Hank has to do is stay overnight... and if there are no ghosts Hank gets Dick's Ferrari! Accompanying Hank is Dick's cousin Sheila, a curious local man named Morgan, and Gabrielle, a psychic. Dick ends up stuck there for the night too, as his car keys have mysteriously disappeared. Spooky! As the night goes on, they find that there are indeed some strange goings-on in the old Hanley house. Will our five friends escape with their sanity? Or more importantly, their lives? Tune in to find out!
Ghosts of Hanley House is nothing special, but it's not without its charm. It's got the standard B-movie trappings - not very good acting, choppy editing, iffy sound - it's not polished by any means. But for the first half at least, it works. Right out of the gate, you get shots of crazy stuff happening in the house (clock hands spinning, doors closing on their own) intermixed with a hand picking up an ax with a woman absolutely screeching bloody murder. This goes on for about a minute and a half, and segues right into the credits, with some really wonky atonal music. It starts things off with an unsettling vibe - these few minutes were my favorite part of the film.
The rough edges actually help the film for a while - it just makes the atmosphere a little more menacing. So even when they start to ape other well known haunted house films (focusing on statues, banging on the door), everything seems just off enough to be a little bit different.
However, once they figure out what is going on with the haunting, the movie kind of loses steam. It essentially turns into a quest with a ticking clock (find these few things and bring them here before sunrise), and it's just not that interesting. I know you can't have random scares and noises for your entire movie, but I may have preferred that to what we actually get.
There is one part that seemed a bit ahead of it's time. After some serious haunted shenanigans, the group decides to leave the house. They venture out into the surrounding woods, and despite trying to go in the opposite direction, they always end up back at the house. I feel like this "end up where you started" motif is all over the place in movies today (especially the found footage ones), so it was kind of cool to see it in such an old film.
Overall, there isn't a lot to recommend about Ghosts of Hanley House. It's an okay B-movie version of The Haunting - and basically everything that made that a classic is diluted here. And really, the only times things work in Hanley is when they deviate from that formula. It would be a good one to have on in the background of your Halloween party, I guess. It isn't too scary or violent, so it could be okay to watch with the kids or the folks. And I suppose there is a certain charm to it's B-movieness.
So I'm glad that I watched it, but I can't be sure you'd feel the same.
I would not recommend this film.
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