Good start, but then it gets ruined

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Blistering performances.

URBAN GHOST STORY is a human drama masquerading as a horror film, or more accurately ghost story. Just as THE MACHINIST saw Christian Bale's character haunted by sinister events of the past, so URBAN GHOST STORY is all about a teenage girl haunted, not by a ghost in her apartment, but by a traumatic incident that killed her friend and almost killed her as well. As such, this is a character drama all about guilt, forgiveness and redemption, so those expecting POLTERGEIST-style hijinks will be sorely disappointed.The story begins slowly, and it's an undoubted disappointment when you realise this has a budget on par with an ITV drama. The acting is changeable, to say the least, and for the first half of the film we're saddled with a repellent lead who it's hard to sympathise with. Then things start to improve, the film begins having fun by twisting the audience's expectations, and the characters grow to the extent they become believable people. No Hollywood gloss here, just strong filmmaking.The cast is wide-ranging for a low budget drama. Jason Connery will always act in his father's shadow, but he handles a complex role well here and I came away liking him a lot. Heather Ann Foster has the toughest role, but she's never less than believable. She fits well into the gritty, grimy surrounds. There are a fair few faces, like the always unpleasant Nicola Stapleton playing another chav character, BRAVEHEART stalwart James Cosmo as a priest, and a scene-stealing Billy Boyd playing a loan shark, about a hundred miles away from his role as Pippin in the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Boyd is a really venomous characters who nails the facial tics perfectly. Even Andreas Wisniewski, the familiar bad guy from THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and DIE HARD, turns up as a ghost hunter.The spiritual stuff is well handled and realistic, and pretty eerie with it. On more than one occasion this film reminded me of GHOSTWATCH, the seminal BBC drama that had viewers scared out of their wits one Halloween. In the end, though, the ghost stuff is secondary to a strong, moving story with genuinely believable characters.

Film-making duo Jones & Jolliffe deliver bleak and spooky visions in modern day Blighty with this inspired tale of the supernatural.A winning cast plays out the story of a 12 year-old girl haunted by survivor's guilt after living through a horrific car accident that claimed her best friend. The guilty conscience coincides with subtle but decidedly ethereal events in the family's rundown, government subsidized building. Is a ghost haunting the family or is there a corporeal explanation for furniture going bump in the night? The film looks startling realistic which heightens the goose flesh when the boo shocks come (especially in the first 25 minutes) but the film doesn't settle for scares, it also examines the real world struggles of a single mother and her brood facing down to earth skepticism of money lenders, social workers and the police. Some viewers may be put off when the film neglects ghostly activity in favor of character study, and perhaps some of the tone shifts are unwieldy, nonetheless this is one of the best (and painfully overlooked by US distributors) British genre films since DOG SOLDIERS. Bravo.

Is there a ghost here, or maybe not? That question is left unanswered, and left as a possibility either way. The girl who's the center of the controversy is a kind of teenage version of Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and it seems possible that she might meet a similar fate, and indeed nearly does. The movie starts off slowly enough and it is hard to become involved, but when the paranormal investigations begin and the medium (noun here) arrives, by then it's engrossing. A nice examination of the various groups who take advantage of the folks who suffer paranormal activity, the tabloids, the parapsychologists, the séance types, all in it for their own gain and treating the "victims" as objects of study, not as people. If this is what the filmmakers intended to show, they were successful. If they were trying to create tension, they were partly successful, and if they wanted to make it a true Urban Ghost Story, they were barely successful. Not recommended for those who really like chills and scares, there are some, but not enough. But recommended for those who'd like a thoughtful examination of the society around paranormal activity.

Finding any work with Billy Boyd here in the US is tough so finding something where Billy is credited as 'loan shark' told me he wouldn't be in it much - and he was only in two scenes. However, the story itself was absorbing, though slow or repetitive in a couple of places. There was a good amount of tension building to keep me interested. While I am not familiar with who's who in the Scottish acting world, I thought there were strong performances by Heather Ann Foster, Stephanie Buttle and Nicola Stapleton, as well as a fair turn for Jason Connery. I was quite astonished by Billy's foul mouthed character - a loan shark that has a stutter that comes out when he particularly angry. I thought he played the part well. He certainly startled me with his performance - so much anger. Generally, I don't go in for these kind of movies and it was curiosity of Billy's previous work that got my attention. But it was the story that kept me watching.