Wednesday, 29 September 2021

Hammer House of Horror: Growing Pains

 "For all the unloved children..."

Well, they can't all be good. Four episodes in, an attempt to do an episode with a creepy kid, and frankly it's a bit of a dud.

There are some good things here, in this tale of a workaholic couple whose neglected son dies, resulting in their adopting a creepy replacement. I like the clever bit of misdirection as we're constantly made to see James as creepy but he's just a red herring, his emotionless behaviour just thowing him to have experienced trauma. The subtext is nice, too: William felt neglected by his parents and seeks revenge from beyond the grave.

Yet it doesn't quite work. The story beats are awkward, there's the foregrounding of a character, in James, who sort of has to be played in a way that is robotic and charisma-free. And the direction shows a strange reluctance to employ any of the visual tropes of horror.

Still, one bad episode of four so far is not bad at all.

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