{"id":3969,"date":"2015-07-25T20:47:49","date_gmt":"2015-07-25T20:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3969"},"modified":"2015-07-16T20:48:26","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T20:48:26","slug":"the-haunting-of-harry-payne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/the-haunting-of-harry-payne\/","title":{"rendered":"The Haunting of Harry Payne"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/strong>, aka Evil Never Dies, a film that’s been bubbling around for several years before eventually dribbling onto\u00a0DVD (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.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Haunting of Harry Payne, ake Evil Never Dies, aka…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u00a0with 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…<\/p>\n

In its favour, this has a decent sense of atmosphere and, in its quieter patches, it works relatively\u00a0well. 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\u00a0ridiculous. 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\u00a0certainly be worse films out there, but it’s still not very good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Haunting of Harry Payne, aka Evil Never Dies, is a film that’s been bubbling around for several years before eventually dribbling onto DVD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1214,8],"tags":[1193,1206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3969"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4028,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3969\/revisions\/4028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}