If the last episode of "Tales of Unease" was the best so far, this one is perhaps the most promising, before an ending that I'll not spoil, but found anticlimactical.
Husband and Wife, Teddy (Jeremy Clyde) and Penny (Tessa Wyatt) come to look at a large but slightly rundown house they are thinking of buying. The house currently has a tenant, Mrs. Laristo (Eve Pearce) and her five children but, once she agrees to let them in, they discover that her family all live in just one ground floor room. She pleads with them not to investigate the upstairs, talking in broken English about an evil that resides there. Whilst Teddy believes that she's just trying it on, to avoid having to leave, the relentless invocations and warnings of Mrs. Laristo start to have an effect on Penny.
Again, no spoilers, but for the most part I thought this was pretty good. It starts with the driving a hilariously unsuitable car (for London) to the house and then the foreboding atmosphere starts to build, first with the children looking down on them from the windows, and then, once they're inside, from Eve Pearce's committed and terrified performance as the family matriarch. The chanting, in particular, of what sounds like a Latin prayer really cranks up the tension as they head towards the forbidden rooms.
But the ending was, for me, a bit underwhelming. It's really hard to talk about why without spoiling and I'm not sure I have a better one in mind, but again I'm left confused as to what this collection of films is actually about, what the theme is. We've had ghosts, human murderers and ethereal spirits but this is a mixture of a few of those ideas and I wondered ahead of time if something like what happens was going to be the only real way out of the story.
Again, if you focus on everything apart from the last couple of minutes, it's a pretty effective, tension builder, it's just not in service of very much.
Husband and Wife, Teddy (Jeremy Clyde) and Penny (Tessa Wyatt) come to look at a large but slightly rundown house they are thinking of buying. The house currently has a tenant, Mrs. Laristo (Eve Pearce) and her five children but, once she agrees to let them in, they discover that her family all live in just one ground floor room. She pleads with them not to investigate the upstairs, talking in broken English about an evil that resides there. Whilst Teddy believes that she's just trying it on, to avoid having to leave, the relentless invocations and warnings of Mrs. Laristo start to have an effect on Penny.
Again, no spoilers, but for the most part I thought this was pretty good. It starts with the driving a hilariously unsuitable car (for London) to the house and then the foreboding atmosphere starts to build, first with the children looking down on them from the windows, and then, once they're inside, from Eve Pearce's committed and terrified performance as the family matriarch. The chanting, in particular, of what sounds like a Latin prayer really cranks up the tension as they head towards the forbidden rooms.
But the ending was, for me, a bit underwhelming. It's really hard to talk about why without spoiling and I'm not sure I have a better one in mind, but again I'm left confused as to what this collection of films is actually about, what the theme is. We've had ghosts, human murderers and ethereal spirits but this is a mixture of a few of those ideas and I wondered ahead of time if something like what happens was going to be the only real way out of the story.
Again, if you focus on everything apart from the last couple of minutes, it's a pretty effective, tension builder, it's just not in service of very much.