If you’re looking for something original to watch, avoid this derivative piece of low-budget nonsense. The plot involves a big house, a new family moving into it, a wife who starts to suspect it is haunted, husband/friends who accuse her of being mad, and a horrific crime that happened inside the house years ago. Now we’ve never heard that story before, have we?
This is the type of thing that would have turned up on the Hallmark Channel late at night before they got all trendy and rebranded themselves as Universal HD (or, as I like to call it, The Law & Order channel).
I could have forgiven Knife Edge’s endless borrowing from The Shining, The Others, The Haunting and many other superior horror films, if it had managed to actually scare me, but there is nothing remotely terrifying about it.
Natalie Press, usually a good actress, is given the thankless role of the petrified wife who begins to hear eerie noises and see strange visions when she, her new husband and her son move into a gorgeous old house in Sussex. She wanders the corridors looking anxious for the majority of the running time. Flapping birds, gory hallucinations and a creepy tree with something nasty buried in its hollow trunk provide the would-be-chills, but it just all comes over as very silly and unintentionally funny.
Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville and the lovely Joan Plowright turn up in supporting roles, but not even their talents can save this ridiculous little film from being total agony from start to finish. Avoid.
Knife Edge (2009), directed by Anthony Hickox, is distributed on DVD by Scanbox Entertainment, Certificate 15.
