Director – Dan Brownlie (Three’s a Shroud, Virus of the Dead)
Starring – Andy Rawlings (Gangsters, Guns, and Zombies) and Dan Brownlie
Release Date – 2019
Rating – 1/5
Over the years I’ve become a huge fan and supporter of the cryptid documentary production company Small Town Monsters which has shown me just how much I love documentaries. I’m always on the lookout for the new STM docs along with any other genre specific doc that I can find.
Shudder has released a few feature length documentaries, as well as, a few documentary series which was extremely fun. When I was looking through the MVD April and May releases I noticed a documentary about the UK haunt scene titled UK Haunters. I shot MVD an email and they were kind enough to send over a review copy. Thanks guys!
**Spoiler Alert** UK Haunters takes a look at the surprisingly expansive haunt scene in the UK. We follow the organizers and promoters as they plan, hold auditions, and decorate for their yearly attractions with some going back for several decades. **Spoiler Alert**
I was pretty excited to check this one out. I’m not much into the haunted attraction scene here in the states but I’m always down for a good documentary. However, this documentary really didn’t deliver that typical documentary feel or insight that I was looking for. Regardless of my opinion on haunts this documentary fell very short.
The interviews in this one are extremely long winded and chaotic. Every time we go to an interview we have this one person talk about the various topics without cutting to other interviewees to discuss the same topic. It makes these interviews feel extremely long and uneventful. This documentary does not space itself out by topics like most documentaries. Instead, we get one interviewee and we are forced to listen to everything they have to say before moving on to the next person. If this was split up into topics like the standard documentary it could have been a little more fun and not as dense.
Finally, the editing in this one is fairly smooth. The transitions and cuts scenes all look nice and the additional footage and inserts look great. Overall, UK Haunters is an extremely long and drawn out documentary that really needed to be edited in a different manner in order to make it feel more engaging. This is one I cannot recommend.
