Rent Crimson Peak (2015)

Glum Gothic Girlfight - Crimson Peak review by Count Otto Black

I'm really starting to go off Guillermo Del Toro. Like Terry Gilliam, he's gotten the idea that if you put enough striking imagery on the screen, it doesn't matter if the story makes no sense whatsoever. It has to be said that this movie looks marvelous. Whenever somebody has a cup of tea (which, for clumsy subplot reasons, happens often), you just know that a property buyer spent days in antique shops looking for a teacup that perfectly matched every other beautifully lit slightly menacing object in the room. And the Old Dark House where most of the film is set is memorably surreal, if at times a wee bit silly.

But this is a movie, not a still life, so it would help if it had a good plot, and it doesn't. This film is obviously Del Toro's homage to Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, especially "The Black Cat". If you've seen the Corman films, you'll constantly be spotting little nods to them, while wishing you were watching them instead because they're a lot more fun, despite their much lower budgets and complete lack of CG ghosts. Also, Tom Hiddleston is no substitute for Vincent Price, even though he looks a lot more like Edgar Allen Poe. It's not entirely his fault, because he was obviously supposed to bring many of the same qualities to this character as he did to Loki. Unfortunately, Del Toro's clumsy idea of making the film "feminist" is to assume that if the the women are strong, the men must be weak. Remove Loki's arrogance (and superpowers) and he's just an insecure wimp, which is pretty much what we get here.

Even worse, since there are so few major characters, the "strong" heroine is obliged to be hopelessly stupid and useless for much of the film because it's a direct homage to movies which always involved a damsel in distress, then go all "Final Girl Versus Jason" at the end because she's also the hero. That's absolutely terrible scriptwriting (by the way, Del Toro co-wrote the script), so it's no surprise that almost every other aspect of the plot is either totally predictable or just plain nonsensical. He seems to think that a Hellboy-style supernatural action comedy turns into a tragic and moving drama if you leave out all the comedy and most of the action. It doesn't.

Oh, and about those CG ghosts? One thing Del Toro has managed to learn from Roger Corman is that if you include a couple of minutes of footage that don't really have anything to do with the rest of the movie but are sure to please the crowds, you can cut a trailer which implies the whole film is like that without actually lying. The few appearances by these spooks, which look too bizarre to be the least bit scary, serve no genuinely useful purpose, and sometimes make the heroine seem extraordinarily slow on the uptake. Let's face it, if you ignore the advice of a rotting blood-soaked zombie with a cleaver stuck in its head to leave the house right now, you deserve everything you get!

Sumptuously filmed shaggy-ghost story - Crimson Peak review by Alphaville

An impeccably filmed, sumptuously designed shaggy-ghost story that unfortunately amounts to much ado about nothing. The occasional ghosts are irrelevant, while scenes of our heroine wandering anxiously around a spooky mansion soon pall. However, this is a del Toro film, so all hell finally brakes loose in an overwrought ending that plays out like a Gothic gunfight. Worth waiting for? The jury's out.

Makes no sense....but who cares?? - Crimson Peak review by TR

Great visuals, great atmosphere, predictable and at times nonsensical story, rubbish CGI (reminder: don't make spooks "wispy", it doesn't work.) So, a mixed bag, but enjoyable for all that.