Bizarrely, considering that nobody in the entire country would admit to watching them, British gangster films sell well on DVD. Much better than horror films. So it makes a lot of sense trying to capture the market by making a horror movie that – wahay, listen to this! – features gangsters. That’s the basic premise of The Haunting of Harry Payne, aka Evil Never Dies, a film that’s been bubbling around for several years before eventually dribbling onto DVD (packaged, naturally enough, as a standard gangster movie). It’s not a bad idea, but the conflicting nature of the two genres doesn’t work in its favour; it’s not frightening enough to be an effective horror film, but there’s nowhere near enough action for it to appeal to the gangsters’n’guns squad.
Harry Payne (Tony Scannell) is fresh out of prison after serving time for murdering his ex partner in crime, Eugene McCann (P.H. Moriarity). Set up with a nice country pub to run he’s plagued by flashbacks about his past, not to mention flash-forwards to unspeakable events that are about to happen. Naturally enough, bad things follow Harry: the village where he’s moved to is haunted by the legendary White Lady of Rayleton and someone seems to be recreating her work by cutting up victims with a selection of handy scythes. Harry becomes the prime suspect, but he has a horrible feeling that the killer could be someone from his past…
In its favour, this has a decent sense of atmosphere and, in its quieter patches, it works relatively well. Unfortunately it’s also a confused mess, with the story becoming completely lost in the unnecessarily non-linear framework; the idea of haunted gangsters isn’t actually all that bad, but the White Lady of Rayleton element is simply ridiculous. With a bit of judicial shearing and more attention paid to some of the secondary characters this could have been a decent fist of a film. As it is, there may certainly be worse films out there, but it’s still not very good.
