Andy Nyman’s the man behind mentalist Derren Brown’s slick, successful and often mind-boggling live shows, so I had great hopes for this collaboration with fellow horror film fan, The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson, in which he himself takes to the stage. He plays an apparently sceptical professor of parapsychology delivering a lecture on the paranormal which he illustrates with a trio of short tales of the spookily inexplicable.
The trouble is, none of them are more than the teensiest bit scary – despite the screams of terror from a couple of excitable schoolgirls a few rows behind me, I barely shifted in my seat. The expectation of the inevitable shock-horror denouements holds the attention, but the actualities (with their sometimes glaringly obvious staging) disappoint in what proves to be something of a letdown.
Still, David Cardy is persuasive as a night-watchman plagued with guilt over his daughter, Ryan Gage is increasingly worried as a stranded teenager driving illegally, and Nicholas Burns makes a very unpleasant expectant father.
But a book falling off a shelf or a suddenly unlocked chain isn’t really enough to shock an audience used to the sophistication of film and, although everything is tied up neatly at the end, the production needs either greater psychological depth or more original effects to really hit the supernatural mark.
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