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'Hallow' has the right ingredients, but the recipe might be off

Eek!

Corin Hardy's frightening and fantastic horror tale "The Hallow" packs all the right ingredients for a satisfyingly creepy collision of science and superstition.

Then it gets cocky, even greedy, by packing in so many of the right ingredients that they begin to weigh down the narrative pace, with key suspense setpieces stretched beyond the point of maximum effect.

Still, "The Hallow" makes for an impressive, atmospheric creep show, delivered with cinematic aplomb by photography director Martijn Van Broekhuizen, along with James Gosling's appropriately jittery music score.

No sooner does a tree expert named Adam (Joseph Mawle) move into an old house in the Irish woods with his wife Claire (Bojana Novakovic) and infant son Finn than the locals try to scare them off with stories about xenophobic banshees, fairies and changelings, oh, my!

Adam does discover something really gross: black, goopy "zombie fungus." The stuff infects animals, eventually explodes out of their heads, then continues to grow all over their carcasses. Yech!

"The Hallow" begins on this David Cronenberg-esque note before quickly seguing into the classic "house under siege by unseen malevolent forces" plot, nicely constructed by Hardy as he ratchets up the tension and further isolates the vulnerable young family.

On a dark road one night, the car stalls. Adam opens the trunk. Something hits him. He awakens, locked in the trunk to the screams of baby Finn, alone in the back seat.

Yep. "The Hallow" punches that old reliable "parental fear" button, along with referencing Lucio Fulci's eyeball-punishing scene in "Zombie," the finale of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and those light-sensitive night creatures from countless other horror tales.

In his directorial debut, Hardy makes great use of his visual arts background in the movie's immersive designs and unsettling texture.

But he makes the same mistake Steven Spielberg almost made in "Jaws" - he reveals too much too soon and depletes the mystery and terror of the creatures of the woods.

Nick Emerson's lax editing allows images and scenes to languish on screen just long enough to slightly drag when they should giddy-up.

Also, the screenplay (by Hardy and Felipe Marino) fails to follow through on the story's ecological subtext as Adam - a conservationist hired to mark trees for cutting down - gets a rude welcome from supernatural denizens protecting their natural habitat.

So, not a great first work from Hardy, but one solid enough that he's directing a remake of the supernatural cult film "The Crow."

“The Hallow”

★ ★ ★

Opens at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. Not rated, contains violence, adult language. 92 minutes.

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