Besides drumming up a few effective scares and an almost competent performance from Daniel Radcliffe, 2012’s The Woman in Black came with a dose of nostalgia for anyone who grew up watching Hammer’s fright flicks from the ’60s and ’70s. The studio was revived in 2010 with Let Me In, but it was the Victorian-era Radcliffe movie that nodded explicitly in the direction of Hammer’s leafy gothic legacy.

Angel of Death takes us back to the now-decrepit Eel Marsh House on England’s southern coast. It’s a great venue for a vengeful ghost mourning the loss of her child, as we learned in the first film. She’s still spooking the place up 40 years later when a bunch of tots end up on the wrong side of the mansion’s Nine Lives Causeway, after being evacuated from a bombed-out London. Among them is young Edward (The Impossible’s Oaklee Pendergast), still in silent shock after losing his parents to Nazi bombs. Sadly, our catatonic little hero is barely fleshed out by Jon Croker’s screenplay while the other children make even less of an impression, robbing Angel of Death of any sense of dread when the miniature bodies start to mount. Dead kids? Boring!

The first movie’s crisp visuals, meanwhile, have been replaced with the kind of underlit murk and cheapo shocks that generally signal a director (TV veteran Tom Harper) who’s well out of his depth and a sound department forced to pick up the load. Phoebe Fox is the film’s sole source of interest as the schoolmistress with her own maternal woes, but it ain’t nearly enough. In Hammer language: the original was a Freddie Francis; this is the shit Alan Gibson cash-in.

Georgia Straight, December 2014