The Woman In Black

We were less-than-impressed with Daniel Radcliffe’s first film after the Harry Potter series, but it may be good for those who prefer the gothic and predictable.

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The Woman In Black (2012)

Episode 5, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: Welcome to another edition of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd. I’m Craig. And today we are on our third week of a Halloween horror and we kicked it off with a woman in black. Let’s say 2012, Daniel

Craig: Craig film, Daniel Radcliffe. Get your Daniels straight.

Todd: That’d be a whole different movie. I think that’s a good point. All right, this is a 2012 Daniel Radcliffe movie. Um, the first one that he did since Harry Potter. So this was kind of a, an interesting choice, a foray out of, uh, sort of the kid soup. Well, I guess from one type of supernatural fantasy into another kind of supernatural horror, I’m still taking place in Britain, still taking place in the Misty Moore’s of, uh, of castles or houses up on Hills and things like that.

So I guess it’s not too far out of his, uh, Ballywick after

Craig: all at that point, you know, there’s a lot going on that is actually really reminiscent of Harry Potter. Uh, you’ve got, uh, a train ride in the beginning to a remote location. You’ve got a, a big mansion covered in old timey portraits that I expected to start talking or moving about at any moment.

Um, so not too big of a leap, really, as far as. Tone is concerned, I guess,

Todd: I guess you got to play it safe when you’re taking your step out into the, into the real world. Again, it’s, it’s interesting. And, you know, um, when the credits came up, I didn’t know much about this film beforehand. When the credits came up, I noticed that it was a hammer horror production, right.

You know, hammer being the sort of quintessential British horror production studio that started out in the sixties, maybe even late fifties and then brought us. Great classics of Dracula with, with, with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing. Um, some of actually my favorite movies, just because they would come on on Saturday afternoons, you know, after the, during MUN cartoons were done or something like that.

And that was really how I got my horror

Craig: fix. Yeah. And you can see, I mean, I can see similarities between those kind of old-school films and this, I mean, it’s, it’s. Uh, very Gothic, a little bit slow paced. Uh, it’s a slow build. It focuses more on the suspense. You can see that in some of the earlier humor pictures

Todd: too.

Yeah. The slow pace of it was definitely something. Again, one of those things you don’t find as much there often. It’s not, it’s not really a modern movie. Uh, this movie. Reminded me a lot of the movies. My wife really likes the Vincent Price films, like the ed ground Poe movies that Roger Corman did, uh, the fall of the house of the usher, the pit and the pendulum especially reminded me of the terror.

Craig: I’m not familiar with it.

Todd: The terror was one that he shot after they had shot another one. You know, Roger Corman was really good about delivering movies under budget and under time. And he would often slap together a script real quick and take the actors that he already had under contract and the sets that he already had built and the crew that was still under contract and, and, and could be paid for another few weeks and he quickly whipped together another movie.

And sometimes that second movie would actually do better than the movie they were shooting before. Interesting. The terror was one that was actually Jack Nicholson. It was one of his first large film roles, um, that he cast him in. And it started out very much like this, uh, where this guy leaves his family and goes to this far off.

A place where there’s by the ocean, a large mansion of sorts that nobody goes up to. And whatever, of course, in his case, I think there actually was somebody living there in this case, Daniel Radcliffe’s character is coming in and there’s nobody living there. He’s actually settling the estate of a woman.

But you know, it was, it was with, with the water surrounding it, it just had the feel of about 15 either hammer, horror films or, um, AIP pictures. Roger Corman, AIP,

Craig: pictures that I’ve seen. Well, yeah, no. It’s as far as set pieces go, I mean, you were talking about, uh, the marshlands and whatnot. The film is beautiful to look at in that respect, the set pieces are gorgeous.

You know, you’ve got this big Goth...