Horror Movie Review: A Date With Ghosts (2015)

A Date with Ghosts or London Haunting (Amazon UK title) is a supernatural low-budget indie horror written and directed by Jason M.J. Brown.

A confused movie, poor editing harms the overall experience and ends up really shining a light on the low-budget nature of the flick. Jumping all over the place, we’re initially introduced to a woman who gets herself lost. That’s that as we shift to sometime later at night where she is with her boyfriend and the pair are at some abandoned abbey.

The pair end up finding another woman alongside a load of body parts. She can’t how she got there and the couple are unsure of if she is trustworthy. Especially considering the severed limbs nearby.

The trio attempt to leave but make the discovery that the abbey has a monk problem. A ghostly monk problem and they aren’t willing to let them leave just yet.

Simple enough, right? Well, rather than keep things as straight-forward as that we get a jarring shift to another time and another set of characters. A brother and sister who are also trapped in the abbey trying to evade the monks.

If you’re not paying 100% attention, something the movie makes fairly difficult to do, you’ll struggle to keep up. The bad editing makes it unclear just whose story were following and as the film is shot in so much darkness, it makes picking characters out really difficult.

The lack of cohesion, the random jumps between night and day segments, the seemingly different locations…it all makes A Date with Ghost feel way more of a chore than it should. If all of this was intentional, the question has to be asked, why? There’s being unconventional and then there is making your movie hard to watch. Certainly, very hard to get drawn into.

I like the style that Jason M.J. Brown was going for though. The grainy atmospheric look fits the shaky camera style of filming. It’s not a found-footage horror but it employs some of the tricks that style has become infamous for.

While it is not a scary movie, the monks are creepy enough and the cast are decent. Although the lack of dialogue is pretty head-scratching. At times, you kind of just want characters to talk even if it’s just to give us exposition.

At 70 minutes long, A Date with Ghosts still feels too long. It’s so randomly edited, so off-beat in how it tells its story that it ends up confusing and leaving you with an underwhelming feeling.