By David Dent
Director Ashley Nashville’s first feature is a spirited return to the ‘first person filmmaking’ (that’s found footage to you, not that the footage is found here) based around a quartet of amateur online ghosthunters named, unsurprisingly and slightly bafflingly, ‘Heraldry Paranormal’.
HP’s head honcho is Finlay McCoy (Jimmy Roberts) whose frustrations over his inability to land a true haunting cause tensions with his team members, namely Seamus (Nashville), Emerson (Tara Buranakul) and Finlay’s sort of girlfriend, their American mentor Clair (Parker Paige). After a potential haunt in a Doncaster Air BnB turns out to be a hoax, Finlay’s problems deepen when he gets into a spat with the property’s owner and a rival paranormal expert, Rosie Watts (Kate Hargrave). He’s almost given up the ghost (pun very much intended) when Finlay gets wind of a couple, Violet and Gemma (Lauren Grendon and Sekki Tabasuares) living in a supposedly haunted house, inherited from a git of a grandfather who disapproved of them being both a same sex couple and married.
But just when it looks like this house might be the real deal, along comes Rosie, and the two ‘experts’ battle for the right to claim the house’s entity for themselves.
For most of its length, Herald Paranormal follows the path of many cheaply made camcorder movies wherein a group of admittedly fun characters goof around in a relatively unscripted way, and it’s hard to get excited about the setup. But things change for the better once the team arrive at Violet and Gemma’s house, building to a reasonably exciting (and occasionally quite scary) climax. Nashville does as much as he can with a threadbare budget (a secret room on the first floor of the house which bizarrely leads to a basement is a nice touch) and the ‘diss’ videos which map the ongoing feuds are pretty funny.
It’s a little overlong and you have to like the characters to get on with this; in particular grumpy Finlay can seem like ‘a lot’. But I liked the freewheeling nature of it, and the shift to horror towards the end is well navigated.
Bloody Flicks 